THE MULTI-OBJECT, FIBER-FED SPECTROGRAPHS FOR THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY AND THE BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY

By S. Smee, James E. Gunn, A. Uomoto, N. Roe, David Schlegel, C. Rockosi, M. Carr, F. Leger, K. Dawson, M. Olmstead and 54 more. 2012

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We present the design and performance of the multi-object fiber spectrographs for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and their upgrade for the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). Originally commissioned in Fall 1999 on the 2.5 m aperture Sloan Telescope at Apache Point Observatory, the spectrographs produced more than 1.5 million spectra for the SDSS and SDSS-II surveys, enabling a wide variety of Galactic and extra-galactic science including the first observation of baryon acoustic oscillations in 2005. The spectrographs were upgraded in 2009 and are currently in use for BOSS, the flagship survey of the third-generation SDSS-III project. BOSS will measure redshifts of 1.35 million massive galaxies to redshift 0.7 and Lyα absorption of 160,000 high redshift quasars over 10,000 deg2 of sky, making percent level measurements of the absolute cosmic distance scale of the universe and placing tight constraints on the equation of state of dark energy. The twin multi-object fiber spectrographs utilize a simple optical layout with reflective collimators, gratings, all-refractive cameras, and state-of-the-art CCD detectors to produce hundreds of spectra simultaneously in two channels over a bandpass covering the near-ultraviolet to the near-infrared, with a resolving power R = λ/FWHM ∼ 2000. Building on proven heritage, the spectrographs were upgraded for BOSS with volume-phase holographic gratings and modern CCD detectors, improving the peak throughput by nearly a factor of two, extending the bandpass to cover 360 nm < λ < 1000 nm, and increasing the number of fibers from 640 to 1000 per exposure. In this paper we describe the original SDSS spectrograph design and the upgrades implemented for BOSS, and document the predicted and measured performances.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/175518acb8c7152fac34a296632579a5b44c5fd8

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Citations in the corpus

SDSS IV MaNGA – spatially resolved diagnostic diagrams: a proof that many galaxies are LIERs (2016, background): “All fibres have an on sky diameter of 2′′ and feed the dual beam BOSS spectrographs (Smee et al. 2013), which cover continuously the wavelength range between 3600 Å and 10300 Å with a spectral resolution varying from R∼ 1400 at 4000 Å to R∼ 2600 at 9000 Å.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: single-probe measurements and the strong power of f(z)σ8(z) on constraining dark energy (2013, methodology): “The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; Fukugita et al. 1996; Gunn et al. 1998; York et al. 2000; Smee et al. 2012) mapped over c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS000, 000–000 one quarter of the sky using the dedicated 2.5m Sloan Telescop (Ahn et al. 2012).”
THE SDSS-IV EXTENDED BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: OVERVIEW AND EARLY DATA (2015, methodology): “The eBOSS program will use the same 1000-fiber optical spectrographs as those in BOSS (Smee et al. 2013).”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasar catalog: tenth data release (2013, methodology): “Quasar targets selected by the various target selection algorithms are spectroscopically observed with the BOSS spectrographs whose spectral resolution varies from ∼1300 at 3600 Å to 2500 at 10 000 Å (Smee et al. 2013).”
Neutrino masses and cosmology with Lyman-alpha forest power spectrum (2015, methodology): “The data consist of a sample of 13 821 spectra selected from the larger sample of about 60 000 quasar spectra of the SDSS-III/BOSS DR9 [9–14] on the basis of their high quality, high signal-to-noise ratio and good spectral resolution (< 85 km s−1 on average over a quasar forest).”
New white dwarf stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 10 (2014, background): “SDSS-III BOSS (Dawson et al. 2013) optical spectra extends from 3 610 Å to 10 140 Å, with spectral resolution 1560-2270 in the blue channel, and 1850-2650 in the red channel (Smee et al. 2013).”
OVERVIEW OF THE SDSS-IV MaNGA SURVEY: MAPPING NEARBY GALAXIES AT APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY (2014, methodology): “Details on the spectrographs are given in Smee et al. (2013).”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample (2016, background): “Smee et al. (2013) provide a detailed description of the spectrographs, and Bolton et al. (2012) describe the spectroscopic data reduction pipeline and redshift determination.”
THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY REVERBERATION MAPPING PROJECT: TECHNICAL OVERVIEW (2014, methodology): “The BOSS survey is one major component of the SDSS III survey (Eisenstein et al. 2011), which obtained spectra for massive galaxy and quasar targets selected using photometry from SDSS I/II and new imaging data in the South Galactic Cap (SGC) in SDSS III.”
The one-dimensional Lyα forest power spectrum from BOSS (2013, methodology): “In BOSS, spectral lamps are used to provide the wavelength calibration, as described in Smee et al. (2013).”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Sample Characterization (2018, methodology): “SDSS-RM Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy The primary spectroscopy has been obtained with the SDSS telescope (Gunn et al. 2006) and the BOSS spectrographs (Smee et al. 2013).”
Stellar Population Inference with Prospector (2020, methodology): “We fit the ugriz photometry and optical spectrum (Smee et al. 2013) from SDSS Data Release 16 (Ahumada et al. 2020).”
OBSERVING STRATEGY FOR THE SDSS-IV/MaNGA IFU GALAXY SURVEY (2015, background): “…the MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO) project (Bundy et al. 2015) bundles fibers from the BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) spectrograph (Smee et al. 2013) into integralfield units to obtain spatially resolved optical spectroscopy of 10,000 nearby galaxies over a 6 year survey.”
SDSS-IV MaNGA : the impact of diffuse ionized gas on emission-line ratios, interpretation of diagnostic diagrams and gas metallicity measurements (2016, methodology): “The survey employs the BOSS spectrographs (Smee et al. 2013) on the 2.5m Sloan Foundation Telescope (Gunn et al. 2006).”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Constraining modified gravity (2016, methodology): “…described in detail in (Reid et al. 2016), which also presents the targeting algorithm developed to select the galaxies: the galaxies were selected from photometry taken using the Sloan telescope (Gunn et al. 1998, 2006), which was also used for subsequent follow-up spectroscopy (Smee et al. 2013).”
THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH DATA RELEASES OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY: FINAL DATA FROM SDSS-III (2015, methodology): “…Physics Network, UK 4 the time the largest camera ever used in optical astronomy; Gunn et al. 1998) and spectroscopy of well-defined samples of galaxies (Strauss et al. 2002; Eisenstein et al. 2001) and quasars (Richards et al. 2002), using a 640- fiber pair of spectrographs (Smee et al. 2013).”