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Three fiber feed integral field units (IFU) are being developed in the SAAO fiber-lab for the Robert Stobie Spectrograph’s visible arm and the future red arm. The smaller, 200 micron fibre IFU has 309 x 0.9 arcsec diameter spatial elements covering an elongated hexagonal footprint of 18 x 23 arcsec is now being commissioned. The larger, 300 (400) micron fiber IFU has 21 x 1.35 arcsec (178 x 1.8 arcsec) diameter spatial elements covering an on-sky area of 18 x 29 sq. arcsec (21 x 44 sq. arcsec). In all cases there are two groups of 13 fibres offset by roughly 50 arcsec on either side of the primary array to sample sky. The 0.9 arcsec spatial resolution SMI provides a median spectral resolution of 2400 at H-alpha wavelengths in the low resolution mode simultaneously covering 320 to 740 nm. At a higher grating angles the SMI will deliver spectral resolution up to 10000 with 0.9 arcsec sampling on sky. A future red spectrograph arm which will extend the wavelength coverage up to 900 nm at a median resolution of 6000 for the same IFU. Each IFU sits in its own slit-mask cassette and is referred to as a slit-mask IFU (SMI). These are inserted in the same fashion as the existing long-slit cassettes at the SALT focal plane. In this talk I will report the laboratory characterization and on-sky commissioning-performance of the first Slit Mask IFU, as well as data reduction pipeline. (IMPORTANT NOTE: this seminar will not be broadcast on the usual seminars zoom link, and will instead be broadcast on the alternative link located above)). |
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