FALCON: a concept to extend adaptive optics corrections to cosmological fields

Abstract

FALCON is an original concept for a next generation spectrograph at ESO VLT or at future ELTs. It is a spectrograph including multiple small integral field units (IFUs) which can be deployed within a large field of view such as that of VLT/GIRAFFE. In FALCON, each IFU features an adaptive optics correction using off-axis natural reference stars in order to combine, in the 0.8-1.8 μm wavelength range, spatial and spectral resolutions (0.1-0.15 arcsec and R=10000+/-5000). These conditions are ideally suited for distant galaxy studies, which should be done within fields of view larger than the galaxy clustering scales (4-9 Mpc), i.e. foV > 100 arcmin2. Instead of compensating the whole field, the adaptive correction will be performed locally on each IFU. This implies to use small miniaturized devices both for adaptive optics correction and wavefront sensing. Applications to high latitude fields imply to use atmospheric tomography because the stars required for wavefront sensing will be in most of the cases far outside the isoplanatic patch.

To appear in the Backaskog "Second Workshop on ELT" SPIE proceedings

References in corpus (4)

• Infared Observations of Nebular Emission Lines from Galaxies at z = 3
• Ultradeep Near-Infrared ISAAC Observations of the HDF-S: Observations, Reduction, Multicolor Catalog, and Photometric Redshifts
• New challenges for Adaptive Optics: Extremely Large Telescopes
• Laser Guide Star for 3.6m and 8m telescopes: Performances and astrophysical implications

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Anisoplanatic Point Spread Function in Adaptive Optics
• Atmospheric turbulence profiling with multi-aperture scintillation of a Shack-Hartmann sensor
• Coupling MOAO with Integral Field Spectroscopy: specifications for the VLT and the E-ELT
• First performance of the gems + gmos system. Part1. Imaging
• GMCAO simulation tool development