The Hector instrument is now commissioned on the AAT.
Hector employs the first new Hector spectrograph (blue and red arm) alongside the existing AAOmega spectrograph. Both are fed with new-generation hexabundles. The higher resolution Hector spectrograph has 11 x 61-core (15 arcsec diameter) and 1 x 91-core (18 arcsec) hexabundles. AAOmega hosts the largest hexabundles with 3 x 61-core, 1 x 91-core, 1x 127-core, and 2 x 169-core (27 arcsec diameter). An additional 37-core hexabundle on each spectrograph observes a star for calibration.
Hector spectrograph has higher resolution at 1.3 Angstroms from 372.7-776.1nm
- R~3800 @ Hbeta/[OIII]
- R~5000 @ Halpha/N[II]
AAOmega has lower resolution of R~1700 blue, R~4500 red.
A new robotic system positions magnets across the field plate which rotate the hexabundles in 3 axes to match telecentricity and ferule positioning, which will improve throughput over the existing 2dF facility. Observers put each configured plate onto the telescope and attach the 21 hexabundles. One plate can be being configured by the robot while another is observing.
The Hector Galaxy Survey began in 2022 overlapping with Hector commissioning and will ramp up in 2023 to up to 100 nights per year for 6 years.
Hector offers significant science gains over SAMI with increases in survey speed, galaxy coverage to 2 effective radii for ~70% of galaxies and higher spectral resolution.
Hector will deliver the only IFS survey large enough to connect galaxy evolution and kinematics to large-scale-structure to explain the evolutionary history leading to individuality of galaxies.
Hector science target regions have been chosen within the future WAVES Survey footprint where significant auxilliary data will be available. In addition clusters have been selected to add the highest halo masses.
Instrument Papers
The published papers related to the instrumentation of Hector can be found at the following page.