Engineering a highly segmented very wide-field spectrograph

R. Ragazzoni; A. Fontana; D. Maccagni; A. Baruffolo; A. G. Bianco; A. diPaola; J. Farinato; G. Gentile; E. Giallongo; F. Pedichini; R. Speziali; V. Testa

doi:10.1117/12.857180

14 July 2010 Engineering a highly segmented very wide-field spectrograph

R. Ragazzoni, A. Fontana, D. Maccagni, A. Baruffolo, A. G. Bianco, A. diPaola, J. Farinato, G. Gentile, E. Giallongo, F. Pedichini, R. Speziali, V. Testa

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 7735, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy III; 77350Q (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.857180
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2010, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

The concept of segmenting the focal plane of an existing 8m class telescope in order to fill it with an array of several fast cameras has been developed further and in this work the status of an engineering program aimed to produce a design qualified for the construction, and to assess its cost estimates is presented. The original concept of just having simple cameras with all identical optical components other than a pupil plane corrector to remove the fixed aberrations at the off-axis field of a telescope has been extended to introduce a spectroscopic capability and to assess a trade-off between a very large number (of the order of thousand) of cameras with a small single Field of View with a smaller number of cameras able to compensate the aberration on a much larger Field of View with a combination of different optical elements and different ways to mount and align them. The scientific target of a few thousands multi-slit spectra over a Field of View of a few square degrees, combined with the ambition to mount this on an existing 8m class telescope makes the scientific rationale of such an instrument a very interesting one. In the paper we describe the different options for a possible optical design, the trade off between variations on the theme of the large segmentation and we describe briefly the way this kind of instrument can handle a multi-slit configuration. Finally, the feasibility of the components and a brief description of how the cost analysis is being performed are given. Perspectives on the construction of this spectrograph are given as well.

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R. Ragazzoni, A. Fontana, D. Maccagni, A. Baruffolo, A. G. Bianco, A. diPaola, J. Farinato, G. Gentile, E. Giallongo, F. Pedichini, R. Speziali, and V. Testa "Engineering a highly segmented very wide-field spectrograph", Proc. SPIE 7735, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy III, 77350Q (14 July 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.857180

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