Performance of AAOmega: the AAT multi-purpose fiber-fed spectrograph

By R. Sharp, Will J. Saunders, Greg A. Smith, V. Churilov, David Correll, J. Dawson, Tony Farrel, G. Frost, R. Haynes, Ron Heald and 4 more. SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2006

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AAOmega is the new spectrograph for the 2dF fibre-positioning system on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. It is a bench-mounted, double-beamed design, using volume phase holographic (VPH) gratings and articulating cameras. It is fed by 392 fibres from either of the two 2dF field plates, or by the 512 fibre SPIRAL integral field unit (IFU) at Cassegrain focus. Wavelength coverage is 370 to 950nm and spectral resolution 1,000-8,000 in multi-Object mode, or 1,500-10,000 in IFU mode. Multi-object mode was commissioned in January 2006 and the IFU system will be commissioned in June 2006. The spectrograph is located off the telescope in a thermally isolated room and the 2dF fibres have been replaced by new 38m broadband fibres. Despite the increased fibre length, we have achieved a large increase in throughput by use of VPH gratings, more efficient coatings and new detectors - amounting to a factor of at least 2 in the red. The number of spectral resolution elements and the maximum resolution are both more than doubled, and the stability is an order of magnitude better. The spectrograph comprises: an f/3.15 Schmidt collimator, incorporating a dichroic beam-splitter; interchangeable VPH gratings; and articulating red and blue f/1.3 Schmidt cameras. Pupil size is 190mm, determined by the competing demands of cost, obstruction losses, and maximum resolution. A full suite of VPH gratings has been provided to cover resolutions 1,000 to 7,500, and up to 10,000 at particular wavelengths.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: the growth rate of cosmic structure since redshift z=0.9 (2011, methodology): “The survey, which began in August 2006 and is scheduled to finish in January 2011, will obtain of order 200,000 redshifts for UV-selected galaxies covering of order 1000 deg2 of equatorial sky, using the AAOmega spectrograph (Sharp et al. 2006).”
Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): the input catalogue and star–galaxy separation (2009, background): “The 2dF robotic fibre positioner (Lewis et al. 2002) feeds a bench-mounted dual-beam spectrograph (Sharp et al. 2006).”
Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Spectroscopic analysis (2013, methodology): “The GAMA spectroscopic observations use the AAOmega spectrograph (Saunders et al. 2004; Smith et al. 2004; Sharp et al. 2006) on the 3.9 m Anglo-Australian Telescope (Siding Spring Observatory, NSW, Australia) for measuring the spectra of the target galaxies.”
The hidden giant: discovery of an enormous Galactic dwarf satellite in Gaia DR2 (2018, methodology): “The night of 2018 June 24 we obtained service mode observations of targets in the field of Ant 2 with the 2dF + AAOmega Spectrograph (Sharp et al. 2006) on the 3.9 m Anglo-Australian Telescope.”
Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): the galaxy stellar mass function at z < 0.06 (2011, methodology): “A core component of this programme is a galaxy redshift survey using the upgraded 2 F instrument AAOmega (Sharp et al. 2006) on the Anglo-Australian c© 2011 RAS, MNRAS000, 1–15 Telescope.”
The Robotic Multiobject Focal Plane System of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) (2022, methodology): “This capability was expanded with the 640 fiber Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) focal plate system (Smee et al. 2013) and the 400 fiber two degree field system (2dF) with the AAOmega spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) (Sharp et al. 2006).”
The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: survey design and first data release (2009, background): “For more details about the performance characteristics of AAOmega, see Sharp et al. (2006).”