AAO HDF-South Redshift Survey - The Spectra

 

Spectrum  HDF_67 (Object ID 5106). The data is shown in cyan, the error array in purple. (The spikes represent the position of bad columns.)

These were  taken in the LDSS++ microslit/object-sky mode. For full details of this novel approach to faint object spectroscopy see the November  and January 1998 AAO Newsletter. Please reference as Glazebrook et al., 2006 (AJ) for any use and further details.

We used a Volume Phase Holographic Grating (the first use of such for low-resolution redshift work!) from Kaiser Optical Systems with a central wavelength of 7800 Angstroms and a dispersion is 2.6 Angstroms/pixel. The peak grating transmission was measured at 82%. The spectra central wavelengths range from 6000-8000A. The spectral resolution with the 1 arcsec microslits is 9A (measured FWHM).  Each spectra is 2048 pixels. They are given in raw form (so must be smoothed with the PSF to give optimal signal/noise). Also they are unfluxed.

The spectra include variance arrays for computation of errors. These were computed from the data counts, CCD gain and readnoise and were used for the cosmic-ray clipping.  The deep depletion MITLL3 CCD has a very high red QE (87% peak) but contains numerous bad cloumns - the location of these are flagged by setting the variance values > 1e30.  A text file list of X positions in the spectra is also available.

The spectra are available in FITS format - the DATA and VARIANCE arrays are given in seperate files. See also the README file with the spectra.
 
Note when looking at the spectra that there are numerous Poission noise peaks at the location of bright sky lines, these can be seen in the variance arrays as values > 1E30. Also note that emission lines are only 3 pixels wide in 2048 pixels of spectrum - hence they look like cosmic rays until zoomed in upon! Emission line identifications were also checked visually on the images.

The data were reduced using a combination of IRAF and the Perl Data Language.



Karl Glazebrook, Nov 23rd 1998 (Updated Sep 2005)