The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) Survey Design, Reductions, and Detections
Abstract
We describe the survey design, calibration, commissioning, and emission-line detection algorithms for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). The goal of HETDEX is to measure the redshifts of over a million Ly emitting galaxies between 1.88<z<3.52, in a 540 deg^2 area encompassing a co-moving volume of 10.9 Gpc^3. No pre-selection of targets is involved; instead the HETDEX measurements are accomplished via a spectroscopic survey using a suite of wide-field integral field units distributed over the focal plane of the telescope. This survey measures the Hubble expansion parameter and angular diameter distance, with a final expected accuracy of better than 1%. We detail the project's observational strategy, reduction pipeline, source detection, and catalog generation, and present initial results for science verification in the COSMOS, Extended Groth Strip, and GOODS-N fields. We demonstrate that our data reach the required specifications in throughput, astrometric accuracy, flux limit, and object detection, with the end products being a catalog of emission-line sources, their object classifications, and flux-calibrated spectra.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2110.04298,
title = {The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) Survey Design, Reductions, and Detections},
author = {Karl Gebhardt and Erin Mentuch Cooper and Robin Ciardullo and Viviana Acquaviva and Ralf Bender and William P. Bowman and Barbara G. Castanheira and Gavin Dalton and Dustin Davis and Roelof S. de Jong and D. L. DePoy and Yaswant Devarakonda and Sun Dongsheng and Niv Drory and Maximilian Fabricius and Daniel J. Farrow and John Feldmeier and Steven L. Finkelstein and Cynthia S. Froning and Eric Gawiser and Caryl Gronwall and Laura Herold and Gary J. Hill and Ulrich Hopp and Lindsay R. House and Steven Janowiecki and Matthew Jarvis and Donghui Jeong and Shardha Jogee and Ryota Kakuma and Andreas Kelz and W. Kollatschny and Eiichiro Komatsu and Mirko Krumpe and Martin Landriau and Chenxu Liu and Maja Lujan Niemeyer and Phillip MacQueen and Jennifer Marshall and Ken Mawatari and Emily M. McLinden and Shiro Mukae and Gautam Nagaraj and Yoshiaki Ono and Masami Ouchi and Casey Papovich and Nao Sakai and Shun Saito and Donald P. Schneider and Andreas Schulze and Khavvia Shanmugasundararaj and Matthew Shetrone and Chris Sneden and Jan Snigula and Matthias Steinmetz and Benjamin P. Thomas and Brianna Thomas and Sarah Tuttle and Tanya Urrutia and Lutz Wisotzki and Isak Wold and Gregory Zeimann and Yechi Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.04298},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
51 pages, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal