The University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory 6.5m telescope: On-sky performance of the near-infrared instrument SWIMS on the Subaru telescope
Abstract
The Simultaneous-color Wide-field Infrared Multi-object Spectrograph (SWIMS) is one of the 1st generation facility instruments for the University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory (TAO) 6.5 m telescope currently being constructed at the summit of Cerro Chajnantor (5,640 m altitude) in northern Chile. SWIMS has two optical arms, the blue arm covering 0.9-1.4 µm and the red 1.4-2.5 µm, by inserting a dichroic mirror into the collimated beam, and thus is capable of taking images in two filter-bands simultaneously in imaging mode, or whole nearinfrared (0.9-2.5 µm) low-to-medium resolution multi-object spectra in spectroscopy (MOS) mode, both with a single exposure. SWIMS was carried into Subaru Telescope in 2017 for performance evaluation prior to completion of the construction of the 6.5 m telescope, and successfully saw the imaging first light in May 2018 and MOS first light in Jan 2019. After three engineering runs including the first light observations, SWIMS has been accepted as a new PI instrument for Subaru Telescope from the semester S21A until S22B. In this paper, we report on details of on-sky performance of the instrument evaluated during the engineering observations for a total of 7.5 nights.
- Publication:
-
Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VIII
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- DOI:
- 10.1117/12.2560422
- Bibcode:
- 2020SPIE11447E..5HK