Bibcode
DOI
Arribas, S.; Mediavilla, E.; Rasilla, J. L.
Referencia bibliográfica
Astrophysical Journal, Part 1 (ISSN 0004-637X), vol. 369, March 1, 1991, p. 260-270.
Fecha de publicación:
3
1991
Revista
Número de citas
42
Número de citas referidas
28
Descripción
This article describes a fiber optic system contrived to perform
spectral imaging of extended objects. It consists of two fiber bundles
mounted simultaneously on the spectrograph, which allow one to change
the spatial and spectral resolution without any modification in the
spectrograph's configuration. At the focal plane, the 61 fibers of each
bundle are arranged in a hexagonal lattice, which permits regular and
symmetrical mapping. When attached to the Nasmyth focus of the 4.2 m
William Herschel telescope (WHT), the diameters of the projected areas
on the sky of each bundle are ˜13" and 60", respectively. This
implies a spatial sampling (distance between the centers of two adjacent
fibers) of 1".5 and 7".3 with a spatial resolution (fiber core diameter)
of 0".9 and 1".4, respectively. Technical details of the design and
building processes, as well as its peculiarities when acquiring and
reducing data, are reported. Special attention is given to the problem
of guiding and centering the object, which is of importance for such
systems.
Several tests to illustrate the performance and possibilities of this
system were carried out in combination with the FLEX spectrograph and
the 4.2 m WHT. They indicate good efficiency and, for some astronomical
applications, clear advantages of the fiber systems with respect to
other techniques.
The Hα flux intensity map and the two-dimensional velocity field
in the central region of the active galaxy NGC 4151 are presented to
show explicitly the possibilities of the instrument.