First Light Results from the Hermes Spectrograph at the AAT
Abstract
The High Efficiency and Resolution Multi Element Spectrograph, HERMES, is a facility-class optical spectrograph for the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). It is designed primarily for Galactic Archaeology, the first major attempt to create a detailed understanding of galaxy formation and evolution by studying the history of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The goal of the GALAH survey is to reconstruct the mass assembly history of the Milky Way through a detailed chemical abundance study of one million stars. The spectrograph is based at the AAT and is fed by the existing 2dF robotic fiber positioning system. The spectrograph uses volume phase holographic gratings to achieve a spectral resolving power of 28,000 in standard mode and also provides a high-resolution mode ranging between 40,000 and 50,000 using a slit mask. The GALAH survey requires an SNR greater than 100 for a star brightness of V ?= 14 in an exposure time of one hour. The total spectral coverage of the four channels is about 100 nm between 370 and 1000 nm for up to 392 simultaneous targets within the 2-degree field of view. HERMES has been commissioned over three runs, during bright time in October, November, and December 2013, in parallel with the beginning of the GALAH pilot survey, which started in November 2013. We present the first-light results from the commissioning run and the beginning of the GALAH survey, including performance results such as throughput and resolution, as well as instrument reliability.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1509.00129,
title = {First Light Results from the Hermes Spectrograph at the AAT},
author = {Andrew Sheinis and Borja Anguiano and Martin Asplund and Carlos Bacigalupo and Sam Barden and Michael Birchall and Joss Bland-Hawthorn and Jurek Brzeski and Russell Cannon and Daniela Carollo and Scott Case and Andrew Casey and Vladimir Churilov and Couch Warrick and Robert Dean and Gayandhi De Silva and Valentina D'Orazi and Ly Duong and Tony Farrell and Kristin Fiegert and Kenneth Freeman and Frost Gabriella and Luke Gers and Michael Goodwin and Doug Gray and Andrew Green and Ron Heald and Jeroen Heijmans and Michael Ireland and Damien Jones and Prajwal Kafle and Stefan Keller and Urs Klauser and Yuriy Kondrat and Janez Kos and Jon Lawrence and Steve Lee and Slavko Mali and Sarah Martell and Darren Mathews and Don Mayfield and Stan Miziarski and Rolf Muller and Naveen Pai and Robert Patterson and Ed Penny and David Orr and Katharine Schlesinger and Sanjib Sharma and Keith Shortridge and Jeffrey Simpson and Scott Smedley and Greg Smith and Darren Stafford and Nicholas Staszak and Minh Vuong and Lewis Waller and Elizabeth Wylie de Boer and Pascal Xavier and Jessica Zheng and Ross Zhelem and Daniel Zucker and Tomaz Zwitter},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.00129},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
22 pages, 28 figures. AAT, 2dF, HERMES