Bibcode
Odewahn, Stephen C.; Drory, N.; Gebhardt, K.; de Jong, R.; Allende-Prieto, C.; Shetrone, M.; Tuttle, S.; HETDEX Collaboration
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #424.18
Advertised on:
1
2012
Citations
1
Refereed citations
0
Description
The VIRUS spectrograph will be installed on the upgraded Hobby-Eberly
Telescope (HET) in the Spring of 2012. This instrument will feature an
array of integral field units and will be used primarily to conduct a
survey for the HET Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). The VIRUS instrument
will be configured to allow parallel observations during the times when
the High-, Medium- and Low-Resolution Spectrographs are operating as the
primary instruments on HET. This parallel mode of observing will be
enabled long after HETDEX is completed and VIRUS becomes a service
instrument on HET. In an effort to explore various scientific uses for
such parallel data, we have taken the record of all HET observations for
the years 2003 through 2009 and estimated the sky coverage that VIRUS
parallel data would have provided. We have used the IFU footprint of
VIRUS as it is currently configured, and all observations with the HET
spectrographs that meet criteria such as length of exposure time, sky
brightness, galactic latitude; and positionally cross-matched these data
with various catalogs, such as USNOB2.0, to assess the number of stars
and galaxies that would have been detected in a VIRUS parallel program.
We review these results here and present plans for software tools that
will allow HET users to plan parallel programs.