Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: The Inamori-Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph (IMACS) is a wide-field, multipurpose imaging spectrograph on the Magellan-Baade telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. IMACS has two channels—f/2 and f/4, each with an 8K × 8K pixel mosaic of CCD detectors, that service the widest range of capabilities of any major spectrograph. These include wide-field imaging at two scales, 0.20'' pixel -1 and 0.11'' pixel -1 , single-object and multislit spectroscopy, integral-field spectroscopy with two 5'' × 7'' areas sampled at 0.20'' pixel -1 (Durham IFU), a multiobject echelle (MOE) capable of N ∼ 10 simultaneous full-wavelength R ≈ 20,000 spectra, the Maryland-Magellan Tunable Filter (MMTF), and an image-slicing reformatter for dense-pack multislit work (GISMO). Spectral resolutions of 8 < R < 5000 are available through a combination of prisms, grisms, and gratings, and most modes are instantly available in any given IMACS configuration. IMACS has a spectroscopic efficiency over 50% in f/2 multislit mode (instrument only) and, by the AΩ figure of merit (telescope primary surface area times instrument field of view), IMACS scores 5.7 m 2 deg 2 , compared with 3.1 for VIMOS on VLT3 and with 2.0 for DEIMOS on Keck2. IMACS is the most versatile, and—for wide-field optical spectroscopy—the most powerful spectrograph on the planet.
DOI: 10.1086/658908
Language: English
Subfield: Instrumentation
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2010547898