Infrared beam combination at the CHARA Array

The CHARA Array consists of six 1-meter telescopes. The telescopes are at fixed positions laid out in a Y-shaped pattern, where the longest available baseline is 330 meters. The resolving power of this interferometric array operating at visible and short infrared wavelengths is better than one milli-arcsecond. The current infrared beam combination system is capable of combining the light from any two of the six telescopes in the array. With the existing infrared beam combination and detection system, we routinely observe in K and H band, where our magnitude limit is 6.