TAURUS: a wide-field imaging Fabry–Perot spectrometer for astronomy

This paper describes the design, development and operation of an imaging Fabry–Perot interferometer (known as TAURUS). The system is primarily intended for mapping velocity fields of astronomical emission-line sources and possesses considerable advantages over conventional grating spectrographs when studying the dynamics of extended objects. In a previous paper (Taylor & Atherton 1980) an outline of the basic design of the system was given together with preliminary results on the active galaxy M82. This paper deals with the formalization and realization of the technique.