First light results from the High Efficiency and Resolution Multi-Element Spectrograph at the Anglo-Australian Telescope

Andrew Sheinis*, Borja Anguiano Jimenez, Martin Asplund, Carlos Bacigalupo, Sam Barden, Michael Birchall, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Jurek Brzeski, Russell Cannon, Daniela Carollo, Scott Case, Andrew Casey, Vladimir Churilov, Couch Warrick, Robert Dean, Gayandhi M. De Silva, Valentina D'Orazi, Ly Duong, Tony Farrell, Kristin FiegertKenneth Freeman, Frost Gabriella, Luke Gers, Michael Goodwin, Doug Gray, Andrew Green, Ron Heald, Jeroen Heijmans, Michael Ireland, Damien Jones, Prajwal R. Kafle, Stefan Keller, Urs Klauser, Yuriy Kondrat, Janez Kos, Jon Lawrence, Steve Lee, Slavko Mali, Sarah L. Martell, Darren Mathews, Don Mayfield, Stan Miziarski, Rolf Muller, Naveen Pai, Robert Patterson, Ed Penny, David Orr, Katharine J. Schlesinger, Sanjib Sharma, Keith Shortridge, Jeffrey Simpson, Scott Smedley, Greg Smith, Darren Stafford, Nicholas Staszak, Minh Vuong, Lewis G. Waller, Elizabeth Wylie De Boer, Pascal Xavier, Jessica Zheng, Ross Zhelem, Daniel Zucker, Tomaz Zwitter

*Corresponding author for this work

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    Abstract

    The High Efficiency and Resolution Multi Element Spectrograph, HERMES, is a facility-class optical spectrograph for the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). It is designed primarily for Galactic Archaeology, the first major attempt to create a detailed understanding of galaxy formation and evolution by studying the history of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The goal of the GALAH survey is to reconstruct the mass assembly history of the Milky Way through a detailed chemical abundance study of one million stars. The spectrograph is based at the AAT and is fed by the existing 2dF robotic fiber positioning system. The spectrograph uses volume phase holographic gratings to achieve a spectral resolving power of 28,000 in standard mode and also provides a high-resolution mode ranging between 40,000 and 50,000 using a slit mask. The GALAH survey requires an SNR greater than 100 for a star brightness of V = 14 in an exposure time of one hour. The total spectral coverage of the four channels is about 100 nm between 370 and 1000 nm for up to 392 simultaneous targets within the 2-degree field of view. HERMES has been commissioned over three runs, during bright time in October, November, and December 2013, in parallel with the beginning of the GALAH pilot survey, which started in November 2013. We present the first-light results from the commissioning run and the beginning of the GALAH survey, including performance results such as throughput and resolution, as well as instrument reliability. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number035002
    Pages (from-to)1-18
    Number of pages18
    JournalJournal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems
    Volume1
    Issue number3
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jul 2015

    Bibliographical note

    Copyright the Author(s). Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.

    Keywords

    • spectrograph
    • spectroscopy
    • survey
    • Anglo-Australian Telescope
    • 2dF
    • volume phase
    • holographic
    • fiber
    • MULTIOBJECT SPECTROSCOPY
    • AAO2

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