PRAXIS: beating the infrared night sky with multicore fibre Bragg gratings

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PRAXIS: beating the infrared night sky with multicore fibre Bragg gratings: The PRAXIS project aims to deliver a new era in ground-based infrared observations. The infrared night sky is a hundred times brighter than the optical night sky, which has severely limited the sensitivity at these wavelengths. But 99 per cent of the infrared sky arises from hundreds of extremely bright, narrow emission lines due to hydroxyl in the Earth's atmosphere. PRAXIS, at the Anglo-Australian Telescope, is designed to cancel these lines using new multicore fibre Bragg gratings developed in Australia. The new fibres would render the night sky very dark and allow Australian astronomers to obtain unique observations. The sky-suppressing fibres would also allow us to develop new instrument concepts for Australia's extremely large telescope.