WEAVE is the next-generation wide-field optical spectroscopy facility for the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain. It is a multi-object "pick and place" fibre fed spectrograph with more than one thousand fibres behind a new dedicated 2° prime focus corrector, This is similar in concept to the Australian Astronomical Observatory's 2dF instrument1 with two observing plates, one of which is observing the sky while other is being reconfigured by a robotic fibre positioner. It will be capable of acquiring more than 10000 star or galaxy spectra a night. The WEAVE positioner concept uses two robots working in tandem in order to reconfigure a fully populated field within the expected 1 hour dwell-time for the instrument (a good match between the required exposure times and the limit of validity for a given configuration due to the effects of differential refraction).

Date Published: 8 July 2014
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 9147, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V, 914734 (8 July 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2055883

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9147:
Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V
Suzanne K. Ramsay; Ian S. McLean; Hideki Takami, Editor(s)