Emission-line galaxies are important targets for understanding the chemical
evolution of galaxies in the universe. Deep, narrow-band imaging surveys allow
to detect and study the flux and the equivalent widths (EW) of the emission
line studied. The present work has been developed within the context of the
OTELO project, an emission line survey using the Tunable Filters (TF) of
OSIRIS, the first generation instrument on the GTC 10.4m telescope located in
La Palma, Spain, that will observe through selected atmospheric windows
relatively free of sky emission lines. With a total survey area of 0.1 square
degrees distributed in different fields, reaching a 5 \sigma depth of 10^-18
erg/cm^2/s and detecting objects of EW < 0.3 A, OTELO will be the deepest
emission line survey to date. As part of the OTELO preparatory activities, the
objective of this study is to determine the best combination of sampling and
full width at half maximum (FWHM) for the OSIRIS tunable filters for deblending
H\alpha from [NII] lines by analyzing the flux errors obtained. We simulated
the OTELO data by convolving a complete set of synthetic HII galaxies in EW
with different widths of the OSIRIS TFs. We estimated relative flux errors of
the recovered H\alpha and [NII]6583 lines. We found that, for the red TF, a
FWHM of 12 A and a sampling of 5 A is an optimal combination that allow
deblending H\alpha from the [NII]6583 line with a flux error lower than 20%.
This combination will allow estimating SFRs and metallicities using the H\alpha
flux and the N2 method, respectively.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures. Some authors added. Accepted for publication in
PAS
