TY - GEN
T1 - The wide integral field infrared spectrograph
T2 - Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VII 2018
AU - Sivanandam, Suresh
AU - Moon, Dae Sik
AU - Meyer, R. Elliot
AU - Grunhut, Jason
AU - Zaritsky, Dennis
AU - Eisner, Joshua
AU - Ma, Ke
AU - Henderson, Charles
AU - Blank, Basil
AU - Chou, Chueh Yi
AU - Jarvis, Miranda E.
AU - Eikenberry, Stephen
AU - Chun, Moo Young
AU - Park, Byeong Gon
N1 - Funding Information:
We acknowledge our funders, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario Research Fund, the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute. We thank Ken Blanchard for his important contributions during the design and manufacture of WIFIS components. We are very appreciative of the Steward Observatory staff, Joseph Horscheidt, Melanie Waidanz, William Wood, and Kenneth Don for their contributions in getting WIFIS operational at the Kitt Peak Bok telescope. We also thank Margaret Ikape who developed the telluric correction software for removing telluric absorption features from WIFIS M85 data.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 SPIE.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - We have recently commissioned a novel infrared (0:9-1:7 μm) integral field spectrograph (IFS) called the Wide Integral Field Infrared Spectrograph (WIFIS). WIFIS is a unique instrument that offers a very large field-of-view (5000 x 2000) on the 2.3-meter Bok telescope at Kitt Peak, USA for seeing-limited observations at moderate spectral resolving power. The measured spatial sampling scale is ∼ 1 x 1" and its spectral resolving power is R ∼ 2; 500 and 3; 000 in the zJ (0:9 - 1:35 μm) and Hshort (1:5 - 1:7 μm) modes, respectively. WIFIS's corresponding etendue is larger than existing near-infrared (NIR) IFSes, which are mostly designed to work with adaptive optics systems and therefore have very narrow fields. For this reason, this instrument is specifically suited for studying very extended objects in the near-infrared such as supernovae remnants, galactic star forming regions, and nearby galaxies, which are not easily accessible by other NIR IFSes. This enables scientific programs that were not originally possible, such as detailed surveys of a large number of nearby galaxies or a full accounting of nucleosynthetic yields of Milky Way supernova remnants. WIFIS is also designed to be easily adaptable to be used with larger telescopes. In this paper, we report on the overall performance characteristics of the instrument, which were measured during our commissioning runs in the second half of 2017. We present measurements of spectral resolving power, image quality, instrumental background, and overall efficiency and sensitivity of WIFIS and compare them with our design expectations. Finally, we present a few example observations that demonstrate WIFIS's full capability to carry out infrared imaging spectroscopy of extended objects, which is enabled by our custom data reduction pipeline.
AB - We have recently commissioned a novel infrared (0:9-1:7 μm) integral field spectrograph (IFS) called the Wide Integral Field Infrared Spectrograph (WIFIS). WIFIS is a unique instrument that offers a very large field-of-view (5000 x 2000) on the 2.3-meter Bok telescope at Kitt Peak, USA for seeing-limited observations at moderate spectral resolving power. The measured spatial sampling scale is ∼ 1 x 1" and its spectral resolving power is R ∼ 2; 500 and 3; 000 in the zJ (0:9 - 1:35 μm) and Hshort (1:5 - 1:7 μm) modes, respectively. WIFIS's corresponding etendue is larger than existing near-infrared (NIR) IFSes, which are mostly designed to work with adaptive optics systems and therefore have very narrow fields. For this reason, this instrument is specifically suited for studying very extended objects in the near-infrared such as supernovae remnants, galactic star forming regions, and nearby galaxies, which are not easily accessible by other NIR IFSes. This enables scientific programs that were not originally possible, such as detailed surveys of a large number of nearby galaxies or a full accounting of nucleosynthetic yields of Milky Way supernova remnants. WIFIS is also designed to be easily adaptable to be used with larger telescopes. In this paper, we report on the overall performance characteristics of the instrument, which were measured during our commissioning runs in the second half of 2017. We present measurements of spectral resolving power, image quality, instrumental background, and overall efficiency and sensitivity of WIFIS and compare them with our design expectations. Finally, we present a few example observations that demonstrate WIFIS's full capability to carry out infrared imaging spectroscopy of extended objects, which is enabled by our custom data reduction pipeline.
KW - image slicer
KW - infrared instrumentation
KW - integral field spectroscopy
KW - near-infrared
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85052630447&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85052630447&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1117/12.2312223
DO - 10.1117/12.2312223
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85052630447
SN - 9781510619579
T3 - Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering
BT - Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VII
A2 - Simard, Luc
A2 - Simard, Luc
A2 - Evans, Christopher J.
A2 - Takami, Hideki
PB - SPIE
Y2 - 10 June 2018 through 14 June 2018
ER -