Accurate estimate of the ESPRESSO fiber-injection losses inferred from integrated field-stabilization images

Ground-based astronomy is unavoidably subject to the adverse effect of atmospheric turbulence, a.k.a. the seeing, which blurs the images and limits the achievable spatial resolution. For spectroscopic observations, it leads to slit or fiber-injection losses, since not all photons distributed over the extended seeing disk can be captured. These losses might have a very substantial impact on the overall efficiency of a spectrograph and are naturally highly variable. Assessing the fiber-injection losses requires accurate information about the image quality (IQ) delivered by the telescope to the instrument over the course of the observations, which, however, is often not directly available. ESPRESSO provides acquisition and field-stabilization images attached to the science data and thus offers the opportunity for a post-processing analysis. Here, we present a novel method to infer the IQ profile and fiber-injection losses from the integrated field-stabilization images, utilizing the spill-over light that does not get injected into the fiber. We validate these measurements against the IQ observed in the acquisition images and determine that our method delivers unbiased estimates with a scatter of 0.11" for the FWHM of the profile and 15% in terms of fiber-injection losses. This compares favorably to the estimates derived from either the differential image motion monitor (DIMM) or the telescope guide probe sensors and therefore represents a valuable tool to characterize the instrument efficiency and to correct raw spectra for fiber-injection losses.
Comment: Accepted for publication with MNRAS