47 research outputs found
The Disk Mass project; science case for a new PMAS IFU module
We present our Disk Mass project as the main science case for building a new
fiber IFU-module for the PMAS spectrograph, currently mounted at the Cassegrain
focus of the 3.5m telescope on Calar Alto. Compared to traditional long-slit
observations, the large light collecting power of 2-dimensional Integral Field
Units dramatically improves the prospects for performing spectroscopy on
extended low surface brightness objects with high spectral resolution. This
enables us to measure stellar velocity dispersions in the outer disk of normal
spiral galaxies. We describe some results from a PMAS pilot study using the
existing lenslet array, and provide a basic description of the new fiber
IFU-module for PMAS.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Refereed proceeding for the `Euro3D Science
Workshop'. Contains updated layout of PPAK fibers, and improved M/L value for
N398
PMAS: The Potsdam Multi Aperture Spectrophotometer. II. The Wide Integral Field Unit PPak
PPak is a new fiber-based Integral Field Unit (IFU), developed at the
Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, implemented as a module into the existing PMAS
spectrograph. The purpose of PPak is to provide both an extended field-of-view
with a large light collecting power for each spatial element, as well as an
adequate spectral resolution. The PPak system consists of a fiber bundle with
331 object, 36 sky and 15 calibration fibers. The object and sky fibers collect
the light from the focal plane behind a focal reducer lens. The object fibers
of PPak, each 2.7 arcseconds in diameter, provide a contiguous hexagonal
field-of-view of 74 times 64 arcseconds on the sky, with a filling factor of
60%. The operational wavelength range is from 400 to 900nm. The PPak-IFU,
together with the PMAS spectrograph, are intended for the study of extended,
low surface brightness objects, offering an optimization of total
light-collecting power and spectral resolution. This paper describes the
instrument design, the assembly, integration and tests, the commissioning and
operational procedures, and presents the measured performance at the telescope.Comment: 14 pages, 21 figures, accepted at PAS
The Influence of Motion and Stress on Optical Fibers
We report on extensive testing carried out on the optical fibers for the
VIRUS instrument. The primary result of this work explores how 10+ years of
simulated wear on a VIRUS fiber bundle affects both transmission and focal
ratio degradation (FRD) of the optical fibers. During the accelerated lifetime
tests we continuously monitored the fibers for signs of FRD. We find that
transient FRD events were common during the portions of the tests when motion
was at telescope slew rates, but dropped to negligible levels during rates of
motion typical for science observation. Tests of fiber transmission and FRD
conducted both before and after the lifetime tests reveal that while
transmission values do not change over the 10+ years of simulated wear, a clear
increase in FRD is seen in all 18 fibers tested. This increase in FRD is likely
due to microfractures that develop over time from repeated flexure of the fiber
bundle, and stands in contrast to the transient FRD events that stem from
localized stress and subsequent modal diffusion of light within the fibers.
There was no measurable wavelength dependence on the increase in FRD over 350
nm to 600 nm. We also report on bend radius tests conducted on individual
fibers and find the 266 microns VIRUS fibers to be immune to bending-induced
FRD at bend radii of R > 10cm. Below this bend radius FRD increases slightly
with decreasing radius. Lastly, we give details of a degradation seen in the
fiber bundle currently deployed on the Mitchell Spectrograph (formally VIRUS-P)
at McDonald Observatory. The degradation is shown to be caused by a localized
shear in a select number of optical fibers that leads to an explosive form of
FRD. In a few fibers, the overall transmission loss through the instrument can
exceed 80%.Comment: 19 pages, 22 figure
Prototype development of the Integral-Field unit for VIRUS
VIRUS is a planned integral-field instrument for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope
(HET). In order to achieve a large field-of-view and high grasp at reasonable
costs, the approach is to replicate integral-field units (IFU) and medium sized
spectrographs many times. The Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP) contributes
to VIRUS with the development and testing of the IFU prototype. This paper
describes the optomechanical design and the manufacture of the fiber-based IFU
subsystem. The initial VIRUS development aims to produce a prototype and to
measure its performance. Additionally, techniques will be investigated to allow
industrial replication of the highly specific fiber-bundle layout. This will be
necessary if this technique is to be applied to the next generation of even
larger astronomical instrumentation.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figures, to be published in SPIE proc. 627
A MUSE map of the central Orion Nebula (M 42)
We present a new integral-field spectroscopic dataset of the central part of
the Orion Nebula (M 42), observed with the MUSE instrument at the ESO VLT. We
reduced the data with the public MUSE pipeline. The output products are two
FITS cubes with a spatial size of ~5.9'x4.9' (corresponding to ~0.76 pc x 0.63
pc) and a contiguous wavelength coverage of 4595...9366 Angstrom, spatially
sampled at 0.2". We provide two versions with a sampling of 1.25 Angstrom and
0.85 Angstrom in dispersion direction. Together with variance cubes these files
have a size of 75 and 110 GiB on disk. They represent one of the largest
integral field mosaics to date in terms of information content. We make them
available for use in the community. To validate this dataset, we compare world
coordinates, reconstructed magnitudes, velocities, and absolute and relative
emission line fluxes to the literature and find excellent agreement. We derive
a two-dimensional map of extinction and present de-reddened flux maps of
several individual emission lines and of diagnostic line ratios. We estimate
physical properties of the Orion Nebula, using the emission line ratios [N II]
and [S III] (for the electron temperature ) and [S II] and [Cl III] (for
the electron density ), and show two-dimensional images of the velocity
measured from several bright emission lines.Comment: Resubmitted to A&A after incorporating referee comments; access to
full dataset via http://muse-vlt.eu/science/data-release
3D Spectrophotometry of Planetary Nebulae in the Bulge of M31
We introduce crowded field integral field (3D) spectrophotometry as a useful
technique for the study of resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies. As
a methodological test, we present a pilot study with selected extragalactic
planetary nebulae (XPN) in the bulge of M31, demonstrating how 3D spectroscopy
is able to improve the limited accuracy of background subtraction which one
would normally obtain with classical slit spectroscopy. It is shown that due to
the absence of slit effects, 3D is a most suitable technique for
spectrophometry. We present spectra and line intensities for 5 XPN in M31,
obtained with the MPFS instrument at the Russian 6m BTA, INTEGRAL at the WHT,
and with PMAS at the Calar Alto 3.5m Telescope. Using 3D spectra of bright
standard stars, we demonstrate that the PSF is sampled with high accuracy,
providing a centroiding precision at the milli-arcsec level. Crowded field 3D
spectrophotometry and the use of PSF fitting techniques is suggested as the
method of choice for a number of similar observational problems, including
luminous stars in nearby galaxies, supernovae, QSO host galaxies,
gravitationally lensed QSOs, and others.Comment: (1) Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, (2) University of Durham.
18 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
The ERA2 facility: towards application of a fiber-based astronomical spectrograph for imaging spectroscopy in life sciences
Astronomical instrumentation is most of the time faced with challenging
requirements in terms of sensitivity, stability, complexity, etc., and
therefore leads to high performance developments that at first sight appear to
be suitable only for the specific design application at the telescope. However,
their usefulness in other disciplines and for other applications is not
excluded. The ERA2 facility is a lab demonstrator, based on a high-performance
astronomical spectrograph, which is intended to explore the innovation
potential of fiber-coupled multi-channel spectroscopy for spatially resolved
spectroscopy in life science, material sciences, and other areas of research.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, SPIE Conference "Astronomical Telescopes and
Instrumentation" 2012, Amsterda
The Stars of the HETDEX Survey. I. Radial Velocities and Metal-Poor Stars from Low-Resolution Stellar Spectra
The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) is an unbiased, massively multiplexed spectroscopic survey, designed to measure the expansion history of the universe through low-resolution (RâŒ750) spectra of Lyman-Alpha Emitters. In its search for these galaxies, HETDEX will also observe a few 105 stars. In this paper, we present the first stellar value-added catalog within the internal second data release of the HETDEX Survey (HDR2). The new catalog contains 120,571 low-resolution spectra for 98,736 unique stars between 10â) Galactic latitudes. With these spectra, we measure radial velocities (RVs) for âŒ42,000 unique FGK-type stars in the catalog and show that the HETDEX spectra are sufficient to constrain these RVs with a 1Ï precision of 28.0 km/s and bias of 3.5 km/s with respect to the LAMOST surveys and 1Ï precision of 27.5 km/s and bias of 14.0 km/s compared to the SEGUE survey. Since these RVs are for faint (Gâ„16) stars, they will be complementary to Gaia. Using t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), we also demonstrate that the HETDEX spectra can be used to determine a star's Teff, and log g and its [Fe/H]. With the t-SNE projection of the FGK-type stars with HETDEX spectra we also identify 416 new candidate metal-poor ([Fe/H] <â1~dex) stars for future study. These encouraging results illustrate the utility of future low-resolution stellar spectroscopic surveys