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Holistic spectroscopy: complete reconstruction of a wide-field, multiobject spectroscopic image using a photonic comb
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Holistic spectroscopy: complete reconstruction of a wide-field, multiobject spectroscopic image using a photonic comb

Janez Kos, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Christopher H. Betters, Sergio Leon-Saval, Martin Asplund, Sven Buder, Andrew R. Casey, Valentina D'Orazi, Gayandhi de Silva, Ken Freeman, …
Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol.480(4), pp.5475-5494
11/11/2018
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sty2175
url
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty2175View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

The primary goal of Galactic archaeology is to learn about the origin of the Milky Way from the detailed chemistry and kinematics of millions of stars. Wide-field multifibre spectrographs are increasingly used to obtain spectral information for huge samples of stars. Some surveys (e.g. GALAH) arc attempting to measure up to 30 separate elements per star. Stellar abundance spectroscopy is a subtle art that requires a very high degree of spectral uniformity across each of the fibres. However, wide-field spectrographs are notoriously non-uniform due to the fast output optics necessary to image many fibre outputs on to the detector. We show that precise spectroscopy is possible with such instruments across all fibres by employing a photonic comb - a device that produces uniformly spaced spots of light on the CCD to precisely map complex aberrations. Aberrations are parametrized by a set of orthogonal moments with similar to 100 independent parameters. We then reproduce the observed image by convolving high-resolution spectral templates with measured aberrations as opposed to extracting the spectra from the observed image. Such a forward modelling approach also trivializes some spectroscopic reduction problems like fibre cross-talk, and reliably extracts spectra with a resolution similar to 2.3 times above the nominal resolution of the instrument. Our rigorous treatment of optical aberrations also encourages a less conservative spectrograph design in the future.
Physical Sciences Astronomy & Astrophysics Science & Technology

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