Many young researchers, in astronomy, astrophysics, atmospheric sciences and remote sensing in general, are facing the difficulty of having to learn how to choose, set up and operate a spectrograph-detector system suited to their scientific needs, but without being an expert for such hardware.
This book presents 3D spectrographs which are now widely used in astrophysics. It gives the fundamentals of spectroscopic instruments in a concise way. Then it focuses on the observer user side and aims to answer the following questions: what is the best instrument given my scientific objectives, what is the best observing strategy, what are the instrumental limits, how can I reduce the data. Although the reader does not need to an instrumentalist expert in opto-mechanical design or data reduction software, there is a need to understand in some detail the instrument in order to use them in an optimum way.
Despite this book, most other books on the market are written from an instrumentalist point of view, drowning the reader with detailed facts about coating and manufacturing details. This books gives those readers the hands-on knowledge to get started fast and do science.