Bibcode
Sabater, Josep; Torres, Santiago; Garzón, Francisco; Gómez, José María.
Bibliographical reference
Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 10707, id. 107070N 11 pp. (2018).
Advertised on:
7
2018
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
Mid-resolution InfRAreD Astronomical Spectrograph (MIRADAS), a
near-infrared multi-object spectrograph for Gran Telescopio Canarias
(GTC), has 12 deployable optomechanical Integral Field Units (IFU).
Based on a robotic probe arm with a pick-off mirror, each of these units
can observe a different user-defined sky object. MIRADAS can work with
target sets where their components are spread over such a wide area so
that all of them do not fit in the field-of-view of the instrument.
Therefore, data sets of that kind require, prior to capturing them, some
arrangement that groups its elements in different subsets where the
distance between the two most remote elements is inferior to the
field-of-view diameter. This field segmentation is achieved using a
hierarchical clustering technique. Our method relies on determining
mutual nearest-neighbors, which will be merged if they show a given
degree of similarity known beforehand. Moreover, we also compute a
geometric center for these clusters, information to be delivered to the
telescope's pointing process. This step is formulated as the minimum
bounding disk problem, which founds the center of the smallest radius
circle enclosing all points of a cluster. Finally, we consider several
real science cases and analyze the performance of the proposed solution.