Extremely Large Telescope

Abstract:

We review the concepts of the Voronoi binning technique (Cappellari & Copin 2003), which optimally solves the problem of preserving the maximum spatial resolution of general two-dimensional data, given a constraint on the minimum signal-to-noise ratio (S/N). This is achieved by partitioning the data in an adaptive fashion using a Voronoi tessellation with nearly hexagonal lattice. We review astrophysical applications of the method to X-ray data, integral-field spectroscopy, Fabry-Perot interferometry, N-body simulations, standard images and other regularly or irregularly sampled data. Voronoi binning, unlike adaptive smoothing, produces maps where the noise in the data can be visually assessed and spurious artifacts can be recognized. The method can be used to bin data according to any general criterion and not just S/N. It can be applied to higher dimensions and it can be used to generate optimal adaptive meshes for numerical simulations.

Abstract:

We present the preliminary design of the WEAVE next generation spectroscopy facility for the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), principally targeting optical ground-based follow up of upcoming ground-based (LOFAR) and spacebased (Gaia) surveys. WEAVE is a multi-object and multi-IFU facility utilizing a new 2 degree prime focus field of view at the WHT, with a buffered pick and place positioner system hosting 1000 multi-object (MOS) fibres or up to 30 integral field units for each observation. The fibres are fed to a single spectrograph, with a pair of 8k(spectral) x 6k (spatial) pixel cameras, located within the WHT GHRIL enclosure on the telescope Nasmyth platform, supporting observations at R~5000 over the full 370-1000nm wavelength range in a single exposure, or a high resolution mode with limited coverage in each arm at R~20000.