People involved at OAB: Cacciari, Merighi, Rossetti
The Bologna Observatory is a member of the Ital-FLAMES Consortium, which also includes the Observatories of Trieste, Cagliari and Palermo, that participated in the completion of the FLAMES project. FLAMES is an instrument facility for multi-object spectroscopy developed at ESO. It consists of several components: a Nasmyth corrector, a fiber positioner, a fiber link to the UVES high resolution spectrograph, an intermediate resolution optical spectrograph (GIRAFFE) with its own fibre system, and coordinating observing software.
As part of the Ital-FLAMES Consortium, the Bologna Observatory has provided the Templates for FLAMES in all observing modes. This activity has been carried out by the contractor E. Rossetti, with assistance from Ferraro (Astron. Dept., Bologna Univ.) and Merighi, in collaboration with personnel at ESO and the Trieste Observatory, and with the coordination of Cacciari, P.I. of the Ital-FLAMES Consortium.
The FLAMES facility is now completed and operational. It was offered to the community with the ESO Call for Proposals of September 2002, and routine observations started on April 1st 2003. Observations for Science Verification (SV) were successfully performed during the period Jan 24-Feb 2, 2003. The Bologna Observatory participated in SV with observations of red giant stars in the globular cluster NGC 2808 aimed at detecting mass outflows from the atmospheres of these stars (Cacciari et al. 2003). The same observations were used to derive Na and O abundances (Carretta et al. 2003, 2004).