SparsePak: A Formatted Fiber Field Unit for the WIYN Telescope Bench Spectrograph. I. Design, Construction, and Calibration

By M. Bershady, D. Andersen, J. Harker, L. Ramsey, Marc A. W. Verheijen. 2004

707 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe the design and construction of a formatted fiber field unit, SparsePak, and characterize its optical and astrometric performance. This array is optimized for spectroscopy of low surface brightness extended sources in the visible and near‐infrared. SparsePak contains 82, 4 .″7 fibers subtending an area of 72′′ × 71′′ in the telescope focal plane and feeds the WIYN Bench Spectrograph. Together, these instruments are capable of achieving spectral resolutions of λ/Δλ∼20,000 and an area–solid angle product of ∼140 arcsec2 m2 per fiber. Laboratory measurements of SparsePak lead to several important conclusions on the design of fiber termination and cable curvature to minimize focal ratio degradation. SparsePak itself has throughput above 80% redward of 5200 Å and 90%–92% in the red. Fed at f/6.3, the cable delivers an output of 90% encircled energy at nearly f/5.2. This has implications for performance gains if the WIYN Bench Spectrograph were to have a faster collimator. Our approach to integral‐field spectroscopy yields an instrument that is simple and inexpensive to build, yet yields the highest area–solid angle product per spectrum of any system in existence. An Appendix details the fabrication process in sufficient detail for others to repeat. SparsePak was funded by the National Science Foundation and the University of Wisconsin‐Madison Graduate School, and is now publicly available on the WIYN Telescope through the National Optical Astronomical Observatories.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/60603cc085d51ca4887ce2b0246abfd7ab4f67f6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

The DiskMass Survey VII. The distribution of luminous and dark matter in spiral galaxies (2013, methodology): “…of 30 spiral galaxies, using stellar kinematics from PPak (Verheijen et al. 2004; Kelz et al. 2006) and ionized gas kinematics from SparsePak (Bershady et al. 2004, 2005), as well as 21-cm radio synthesis data from the WSRT, GMRT and VLA, near-infrared (NIR) photometry from the Two-Micron…”
THE MANGA INTEGRAL FIELD UNIT FIBER FEED SYSTEM FOR THE SLOAN 2.5 M TELESCOPE (2014, methodology): “EDM-Enabled Tapered Hexagonal Bore The primary method for building bare-fiber IFUs has been a mold-release process pioneered for DensePak on the WIYN 3.5m telescope (Barden et al. 1998), and subsequently adopted for SparsePak (Bershady et al. 2004) and PPak (Kelz et al. 2006) on the WIYN and Calar A”