1. Realizing the potential of the Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper: Calibration methods and on-sky performance
- Author
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Lokhorst, Deborah M., Chen, Seery, Pasha, Imad, Purcell, Victoria, Bowman, William P., Liu, Qing, Shen, Zili, MacNichol, Aidan, Malakhov, Evgeni I., Abraham, Roberto G., and van Dokkum, Pieter
- Subjects
Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics - Abstract
The Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper is an innovative all-refracting telescope designed to carry out ultra-low surface brightness wide-field mapping of visible wavelength line emission. Equipped with ultranarrowband (0.8 nm bandwidth) filters mounted in Dragonfly Filter-Tilter instrumentation, the Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper maps H$\alpha$, [NII]$\lambda$6583, and [OIII]$\lambda$5007 line emission produced by structures with sizes ranging from $\sim$1 to 1000 kpc in the local Universe. These spatial scales encompass that of the exceedingly diffuse and faintly radiating circumgalactic medium, which is singularly difficult to detect with conventional mirror-based telescope instrumentation. Extremely careful control of systematics is required to directly image these large scale structures, necessitating high fidelity sky background subtraction, wavelength calibration, and specialized flat-fielding methods. In this paper, we discuss the on-sky performance of the Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper with these methods in place., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 2024 Proceedings
- Published
- 2024