| Type |
Conference Paper |
| Names |
Eric Hooper, Matthew A. Bershady, Arthur Eigenbrot, Corey M. Wood, Scott Buckley, Michael Smith, Charles Corson, Marsha J. Wolf, Guanying Y. Zhu, Andrea Vang, John S. Gallagher, Andrew Sheinis, Washburn Astronomical Laboratories |
| Conference Name |
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts |
| Volume |
225 |
| Date |
January 1, 2015 |
| URL |
http://adsabs.org/2015AAS.22533716H |
| Library Catalog |
adslabs.org |
| Abstract |
The WIYN Observatory recently installed two new integral field units
(IFUs) on its 3.5-meter telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona. Each IFU is
unique in that it contains different sized fibers in the same head to
optimize the tradeoff between spatial resolution and surface brightness
sensitivity for observations of galaxies. These instruments were
designed and constructed (M. Bershady, PI) at the University of
Wisconsin's Washburn Astronomical Laboratory. HexPak, with a central
core of 1 arcsec fibers surrounded by a halo of 3 arcsec fibers, was
designed for early type, face-on disk, and quasar host galaxies.
GradPak, with a series of rows of fibers of increasing diameter from 2
arcsec to 6 arcsec (5 different diameters total), was designed for
edge-on galaxies, where the small fibers lie along the midplane and
larger fibers sample the progressively lower surface brightnesses above
the plane. The instruments were installed alongside the existing
SparsePak IFU in late 2013 and have been used in several observing runs
since. The different fiber sizes present additional data reduction
challenges, particularly regarding flux calibration and sky subtraction.
Early results on studies of the stellar populations of galaxies are
quite promising and demonstrate the advantages of fiber sizes tailored
to the objects under study. HexPak and GradPak were built with funds
from NSF award ATI-0804576. |