Mr. Wilfred T. Gee Profile

Wilfred T. Gee

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Publications (7)

Proceedings Article | 15 August 2024 Presentation + Paper

Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) for Subaru Telescope: progressing final steps to science operation

Naoyuki Tamura, Kiyoto Yabe, Shintaro Koshida, Yuki Moritani, Masayuki Tanaka, Miho Ishigaki, Yuki Ishizuka, Yukiko Kamata, Ali Allaoui, Akira Arai, Stéphane Arnouts, Rudy Barette, Robert Barkhouser, Eddie Bergeron, Patrick Blanchard, Neven Caplar, Michael Carle, Pierre-Yves Chabaud, Yin-Chang Chang, Hsin-Yo Chen, Richard C. Chou, Judith Cohen, Ricardo Costa, Thibaut Crauchet, Rodorigo de Almeida, Antonio de Oliveira, Ligia de Oliveira, Kjetil Dohlen, Leandro dos Santos, László Dobos, Richard Ellis, Steve Ertel, Maximilian Fabricius, Décio Ferreira, Hisanori Furusawa, Wilfred Gee, Javier Garciá-Carpio, Roman Gerasimov, Mirek Golebiowski, Aidan Gray, James Gunn, ChangHoon Hahn, Satoshi Hamano, Randolph Hammond, Albert Harding, Takashi Hattori, Kota Hayashi, Wanqiu He, Timothy Heckman, Stephen Hope, Shu-Fu Hsu, Pin-Jie Huang, Marc Jaquet, Eric Jeschke, Christian Jespersen, Yipeng Jing, Russell Kackley, Jennifer Karr, Satoshi Kawanomoto, Masahiko Kimura, Evan Kirby, Michitaro Koike, Eiichiro Komatsu, Yusei Koyama, Vincent Le Brun, Arnaud Le Fur, David Le Mignant, Gerald Lemson, Yen-Ting Lin, Hung-Hsu Ling, Craig Loomis, Robert Lupton, Fabrice Madec, Danilo Marchesini, Lucas Marrara, Dmitry Medvedev, Sogo Mineo, Arik Mitschang, Satoshi Miyazaki, Kumiko Morihana, Takahiro Morishima, Hitoshi Murayama, Graham Murray, Sakurako Okamoto, Hirofumi Okita, Masato Onodera, Vera Passegger, Joshua Peebles, Paul Price, Tae-Soo Pyo, Lucio Ramos, Daniel Reiley, Martin Reinecke, Mitsuko Roberts, Josemar Rosa, Julien Rousselle, Kody Rubio, Kiaina Schubert, Michael Seiffert, Jared Siegel, Stephen Smee, Laerte Sodré, Michael Strauss, Tomomi Sunayama, Christian Surace, Masahiro Takada, Yuhei Takagi, Ichi Tanaka, Yoko Tanaka, Aniruddha Thakar, Didier Vibert, Shiang-Yu Wang, Chih-Yi Wen, Suzanne Werner, Matthew Wung, Chi-Hung Yan, Naoki Yasuda, Hiroshige Yoshida

Proceedings Volume 13096, 1309605 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3015967

KEYWORDS: Telescopes, Equipment, Engineering, Cameras, Calibration, Observatories, Stars, Near infrared, Observational astronomy, Spectrographs

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The instrumentation of the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS), a next generation facility instrument on the Subaru telescope, is now in the final phase of its commissioning process and its general, open-use operations for sciences will provisionally start in 2025. The instrument enables simultaneous spectroscopy with 2386 individual fibers distributed over a very wide (∼1.3 degrees in diameter) field of view on the Subaru’s prime focus. The spectra cover a wide range of wavelengths from 380nm to 1260nm in one exposure in the Low-Resolution (LR) mode (while the visible red channel has the Medium-Resolution (MR) mode as well that covers 710−885nm). The system integration activities at the observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii have been continuing since the arrival of the Metrology Camera System in 2018. On-sky engineering tests and observations have also been carried out continually since September 2021 and, despite various difficulties in interlacing commissioning processes with development activities on the schedule and addressing some major issues on hardware and software, the team successfully observed many targeted stars as intended over the entire field of view (Engineering First Light) in September 2022. Then in parallel to the arrival, integration and commissioning of more hardware components, validations and optimizations of the performance and operation of the instrument are ongoing. The accuracy of the fiber positioning process and the speed of the fiber reconfiguration process have been recently confirmed to be ∼ 20−30μm for 95% of allocated fibers, and ∼130 seconds, respectively. While precise quantitative analyses are still in progress, the measured throughput has been confirmed to be consistent with the model where the information from various sub-components and sub-assemblies is integrated. Long integration of relatively faint objects are being taken to validate an expected increase of signal-to-noise ratio as more exposures are taken and co-added without any serious systematic errors from, e.g., sky subtraction process. The PFS science operation will be carried out in a queue mode by default and various developments, implementations and validations have been underway accordingly in parallel to the instrument commissioning activities. Meetings and sessions are arranged continually with the communities of potential PFS users on multiple scales, and discussions are iterated for mutual understanding and possible optimization of the rules and procedures over a wide range of processes such as proposal submission, observation planning, data acquisition and data delivery. The end-to-end processes of queue observations including successive exposures with updated plans based on assessed qualities of the data from past observations are being tested during engineering observations, and further optimizations are being undertaken. In this contribution, a top-level summary of these achievements and ongoing progresses and future perspectives will be provided.

SPIE Journal Paper | 8 October 2021

On-sky demonstration of precision photometry with Bayer color filter arrays

Wilfred Gee, Olivier Guyon, Nemanja Jovanovic, Christian Schwab, David Coutts, Josh Walawender, Aru Mukherjea

JATIS, Vol. 7, Issue 04, 048001, (October 2021) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.10.1117/1.JATIS.7.4.048001

KEYWORDS: Stars, Photometry, Detection and tracking algorithms, Optical filters, RGB color model, Exoplanets, Cameras, Sensors, Astronomy, Calibration

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Proceedings Article | 13 December 2020 Presentation + Paper

PANOPTES: A citizen science project to discover exoplanets from your backyard using off-the-shelf hardware

Preethi Krishnamoorthy, Josh Walawender, Wilfred Tyler Gee, Olivier Guyon

Proceedings Volume 11445, 114452J (2020) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2563188

KEYWORDS: Exoplanets, Astronomy, Observatories, Robots

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Proceedings Article | 3 January 2020 Paper

The Huntsman Telescope: lessons learned from building an autonomous telescope from COTS components

Anthony Horton, Lee Spitler, Wilfred Gee, Fergus Longbottom, Jaime Alvarado-Montes, Amir Bazkiaei, Sarah Caddy, Steven Lee

Proceedings Volume 11203, 1120306 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2539579

KEYWORDS: Telescopes, Commercial off the shelf technology, Observatories, Lenses, Astronomical telescopes, Astronomy, CCD cameras, Computer aided design, Exoplanets, Imaging arrays

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Proceedings Article | 10 July 2018 Presentation

Project PANOPTES: the good, the bad, and the ugly challenges of running a successful Pro-Am astronomy project (Conference Presentation)

Wilfred Gee, Christian Schwab, David Coutts, Olivier Guyon, Josh Walawender

Proceedings Volume 10707, 1070702 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2314317

KEYWORDS: Astronomy, Cameras, Software development, Exoplanets, Lenses, Data analysis, Observatories, Clouds

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PANOPTES is a citizen-science based project to discover exoplanets with consumer cameras. It is open source and aims to be highly efficient at collecting photometric data by running a wide field survey using DSLR cameras and standard lenses. In the two years since the demonstration of the baseline design at SPIE 2016 the project has moved forward in getting the hardware design ready for citizen scientists and data analysis, benefiting from an influx of both professional and amateur support. At the same time the project has experienced a number of challenges related to the nature of a grassroots project with no specific institutional home. Here we present a status update to the project with a focus on the issues associated with creating, and maintaining, a successful “pro-am” astronomy project. This talk will specifically focus on a couple of keys concepts related to the operation of PANOPTES as a distributed observatory built by a collection of professional and amateur astronomers. These concepts can largely be broken down as: software; hardware; and organizational. However, a central theme of the talk will also be the fact that PANOPTES operates without a centralized institution, which means that decisions related to software and hardware are necessarily tied into the organizational decisions. Likewise, since the project has no official operating budget but operates largely off the budgets of each individual team (in addition to a NASA/JPL grant, the attainment of which will also be discussed), the hardware decisions and the evolving landscape of commercial over-the-counter (COTC) hardware play a significant role in the operation and maintenance of the project as a whole, which in turn affects how the software is developed. Through all of these areas PANOPTES has experienced successes and failures as well as simple deviations from original plans. As a project we have benefited enormously from the donation of time and storage on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), allowing us to explore technologies and solutions that would otherwise be unfeasible, but as an unofficial project we have been unable to secure a permanent formal agreement with GCP, creating challenges related to the long-term viability of those software solutions. Being a unique project that aims to be as scientifically productive as it is successful as an outreach tool, it is hoped that the talk will provide some valuable learned lessons for any future projects that hope to utilize the unique professional-amateur dynamic that exists within the field of astronomy and open-source software.

Proceedings Article | 9 August 2016 Paper

Project PANOPTES: a citizen-scientist exoplanet transit survey using commercial digital cameras

Wilfred Gee, Olivier Guyon, Josh Walawender, Nemanja Jovanovic, Luc Boucher

Proceedings Volume 9908, 99085V (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2234461

KEYWORDS: Exoplanets, Digital cameras, Astronomy, Cameras, Planets, Astronomy, Stars, Observatories, Electroluminescent displays, Photometry, Electronics

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Proceedings Article | 22 July 2014 Paper

The PANOPTES project: discovering exoplanets with low-cost digital cameras

Olivier Guyon, Josh Walawender, Nemanja Jovanovic, Mike Butterfield, Wilfred Gee, Rawad Mery

Proceedings Volume 9145, 91453V (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2057288

KEYWORDS: Cameras, Exoplanets, Prototyping, Algorithm development, Observatories, Sensors, Stars, Photometry, Digital cameras, Telescopes

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