Monday 23rd January 2017

Attendees: Don, Nadia, Nick (telecon)

SEDM paper discussion

• Nick has agreed to contribute with Section 2 (Instrument overview)to the SEDM paper. He has a more detailed instrumental paper in preparation, so this section will contain a very general outline of the instrument and its two main components: RC and IFU.
• Aspects that are god to discuss in the paper (Performance section) are:
  • Measured wavelength resolution (from sky lines or planetary nebulae) - FWHM
  • Accuracy in wavelength calibration. Use bright planetary nebula spectra to constrain the wavelength solution error.
  • Measurement of the FWHM of the IFU PSF vs. the FWHM of the seeing derived from RC measurements.
  • Confirm the plate scale. Use birght star clusters to measure what is the IFU FoV. Maybe the image quality is good, but if the plate scale is bad, the light would be spread over a larger amount of spaxels, reducing the S/N. Maybe the instrument is degrading the instrument focus. Optically, with 1 arcsec seeing, there would be only 1 pixel with most of the signal.
• Nick is happy to help during the time the instrument is in campus. However, two main things are required first:
  • Exact plan of: Problem - Problem Impact - Solution - Cost solution to identify and quantify the additional issues with image quality.
  • Define the exact time that the instrument will stay at Caltech, so that Nick could account for this.

-- NadiaBlagorodnova - 24 Jan 2017