An adjustable slit mechanism for a fiber-fed multi-object spectrograph

Fiber-fed multi-object spectrographs have greatly enhanced the spectroscopic capabilities of the world's premiere telescopes, but their flexibility has typically been limited by a fixed effective slit size that constrains the available resolving power. We present a novel mechanism that, for the first time, equips a fiber-fed spectrograph with multiple discreet slits of different widths. In this paper, we detail the mechanical design of our variable slit mechanism, which is capable of positioning any one of six slits in front of the fibers immediately prior to injection into the spectrograph's optical train. Further, we present the details of related system necessary to achieve closed loop positioning of the slit mechanism given that no encoder is used. We also briefly discuss our use of open source and open hardware projects in the design. Finally, we describe the control system we have implemented for this subsystem.