The HETDEX Instrumentation: Hobby-Eberly Telescope Wide Field Upgrade and VIRUS
Abstract
The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) is undertaking a blind wide-field low-resolution spectroscopic survey of 540 square degrees of sky to identify and derive redshifts for a million Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies (LAEs) in the redshift range 1.9 < z < 3.5. The ultimate goal is to measure the expansion rate of the Universe at this epoch, to sharply constrain cosmological parameters and thus the nature of dark energy. A major multi-year wide field upgrade (WFU) of the HET was completed in 2016 that substantially increased the field of view to 22 arcminutes diameter and the pupil to 10 meters, by replacing the optical corrector, tracker, and prime focus instrument package and by developing a new telescope control system. The new, wide-field HET now feeds the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS), a new low-resolution integral field spectrograph (LRS2), and the Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF), a precision near-infrared radial velocity spectrograph. VIRUS consists of 156 identical spectrographs fed by almost 35,000 fibers in 78 integral field units arrayed at the focus of the upgraded HET. VIRUS operates in a bandpass of 3500-5500 Angstroms with resolving power R~800. VIRUS is the first example of large scale replication applied to instrumentation in optical astronomy to achieve spectroscopic surveys of very large areas of sky. This paper presents technical details of the HET WFU and VIRUS, as flowed-down from the HETDEX science requirements, along with experience from commissioning this major telescope upgrade and the innovative instrumentation suite for HETDEX.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2110.03843,
title = {The HETDEX Instrumentation: Hobby-Eberly Telescope Wide Field Upgrade and VIRUS},
author = {Gary J. Hill and Hanshin Lee and Phillip J. MacQueen and Andreas Kelz and Niv Drory and Brian L. Vattiat and John M. Good and Jason Ramsey and Herman Kriel and Trent Peterson and D. L. DePoy and Karl Gebhardt and J. L. Marshall and Sarah E. Tuttle and Svend M. Bauer and Taylor S. Chonis and Maximilian H. Fabricius and Cynthia Froning and Marco Haeuser and Briana L. Indahl and Thomas Jahn and Martin Landriau and Ron Leck and Francesco Montesano and Travis Prochaska and Jan M. Snigula and Gregory R. Zeimann and Randy Bryant and George Damm and J. R. Fowler and Steven Janowiecki and Jerry Martin and Emily Mrozinski and Stephen Odewahn and Sergey Rostopchin and Matthew Shetrone and Renny Spencer and Erin Mentuch Cooper and Taft Armandroff and Ralf Bender and Gavin Dalton and Ulrich Hopp and Eiichiro Komatsu and Harald Nicklas and Lawrence W. Ramsey and Martin M. Roth and Donald P. Schneider and Chris Sneden and Matthias Steinmetz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.03843},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
65 pages, 25 figures, published in the Astronomical Journal; replaced with final published version