The AAO fiber instrument data simulator

The fiber instrument data simulator is an in-house software tool that simulates detector images of fiber-fed spectrographs developed by the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO). In addition to helping validate the instrument designs, the resulting simulated images are used to develop the requir...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:SPIE Proceedings, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy IV
Main Authors: Goodwin, Michael, Farrell, Tony, Smedly, Scott, Heald, Ron, Heijmans, Jeroen, De Silva, Gayandhi, Carollo, Daniela
Other Authors: McLean, Ian S., Ramsay, Suzanne K., Takami, Hideki
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 2012
Subjects:
AAT
Data simulator
HERMES
High-resolution fiber spectrograph
Instrument model
Multi-object
SAMI
sami
Online Access:https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/33cff74c-2811-4d29-b2ec-41cbdae01046
https://doi.org/10.1117/12.924990
https://research-management.mq.edu.au/ws/files/62466352/Publisher%20version%20(open%20access).pdf
http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84871950682&partnerID=8YFLogxK
Description
Summary:The fiber instrument data simulator is an in-house software tool that simulates detector images of fiber-fed spectrographs developed by the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO). In addition to helping validate the instrument designs, the resulting simulated images are used to develop the required data reduction software. Example applications that have benefited from the tool usage are the HERMES and SAMI instrumental projects for the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). Given the sophistication of these projects an end-to-end data simulator that accurately models the predicted detector images is required. The data simulator encompasses all aspects of the transmission and optical aberrations of the light path: from the science object, through the atmosphere, telescope, fibers, spectrograph and finally the camera detectors. The simulator runs under a Linux environment that uses pre-calculated information derived from ZEMAX models and processed data from MATLAB. In this paper, we discuss the aspects of the model, software, example simulations and verification.

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