Browsing by Subject "LRS2"
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Item The development of replicated optical integral field spectrographs and their application to the study of Lyman-alpha emission at moderate redshifts(2015-08) Chonis, Taylor Steven; Hill, Gary J.; Finkelstein, Steven L; Gebhardt, Karl; Greene, Jenny E; Jaffe, Daniel TIn the upcoming era of extremely large ground-based astronomical telescopes, the design of wide-field spectroscopic survey instrumentation has become increasingly complex due to the linear growth of instrument pupil size with telescope diameter for a constant spectral resolving power. The upcoming Visible Integral field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS), a baseline array of 150 copies of a simple integral field spectrograph that will be fed by 33,600 optical fibers on the upgraded Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at McDonald Observatory, represents one of the first uses of large-scale replication to break the relationship between instrument pupil size and telescope diameter. By dividing the telescope's field of view between a large number of smaller and more manageable instruments, the total information grasp of a traditional monolithic survey spectrograph can be achieved at a fraction of the cost and engineering complexity. To highlight the power of this method, VIRUS will execute the HET Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) and survey ~420 square degrees of sky to an emission line flux limit of ~1e-17 erg/s/cm^2 to detect ~1e6 Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies (LAEs) as probes of large-scale structure at redshifts of 1.9