Preparing Multi Object Spectroscopy Observations

Although CANDELS is a photometric survey, many team members have proposed for and been granted observing time for CANDELS sources to obtain spectroscopy. Such additional data not only provides us with a more accurate measurement of the distances of galaxies (aka redshift), but also with additional information to decode their properties, such as how many stars they are forming and how much dust is contained in the galaxies.

Figure 1: Example pointing for a MOS observation with the GMOS
instrument at the Gemini Telescope. The image in the background shows
the targeted sky area. The cyan outline shows the field of view of the
instrument with the gaps between the 3 CCD detectors. The dashed outlined
box shows the sky area in which the guide star needs to be placed. The red
"arm" shows the arm that holds the camera that monitors the guide star.

Classically, spectroscopy was carried out object by object, by placing one long slit where your one object is located. With this you restrict the area which lets light through to the detector to a narrow slit and blocking out everything else around it. The light that enters the prism or grism through this slit is then dispersed according to its wavelength, creating a spectrum of the object. Bright spots highlight the presence of elements that emit at this frequency/wavelength, and dark spots tell us where certain elements absorbed light and stopped it from reaching us. You can imagine though that carrying out such observations object by object is very time consuming.

In the last decades though, astronomical studies for galaxy evolution started to greatly profit from new instrumentation which allows us to observe many objects at the same time. This is not only true for taking images of the sky, but also for spectroscopic observations.

One method to take spectroscopy of many objects at the same time is grism spectroscopy, which we showed you in our post about grism spectroscopy with the Hubble Space Telescope. In that case nothing in your field of view is masked out and everything is dispersed. If your field of view is very crowded, meaning you have many many objects in your piece of sky, many spectra will overlap and will be hard to disentangle.

Figure 2: I-band image of the piece of sky to be observed with Multi Object
Spectroscopy within the mask-making software. The red outline shows the
field of view of the instrument, the blue stripes mark the gaps between the
detectors. All potential target objects are marked with different smaller
symbols according to their priority (blue triangles, green boxes, white circles
and cyan diamonds for alignment stars).

Another method is multi-object spectroscopy (MOS) via slit-masks. With this method you can take spectra for many objects at the same time by placing slits on many objects and blocking out the rest of the sky. This requires the creation of so-called MOS-masks in which the slit areas and the blocked out areas are clearly defined. This means that for every different observation you need a custom mask. Most current instruments require these masks to be prepared well in advance of the observation and to be cut out of plastic. This process isn't feasible for a space telescope, but works very well on the ground. However, times are changing. For example, for the MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrometer for InfraRed Exploration) instrument at the Keck Telescope, the masks are created on the fly and "bars" that create slits are then moved into the right position within the instrument. Also for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope a MOS unit will be available. It is designed in such a way that little shutters open and close to produce slits and masked out areas. For many other instruments however, a mask is essentially one large piece of plastic that has lots of tiny slits cut out of it. The slits are placed exactly where you want to observe an object. To create such a mask is in principle relatively simple and I illustrate the process here with a series of images.

I recently created some MOS masks for the Gemini Multi Object Spectrograph (GMOS) instrument at the Gemini Telescope to observe CANDELS galaxies and will use one of the masks I created as an example here to illustrate the process. Firstly, an image of the desired piece of sky in which the positions of the objects you want to observe are measured (Figure 2) and a list of objects, i.e. a catalogue, are required. From that list we  picked our desired targets. Often these are selected based on specific properties and limited by their brightness to ensure the maximum success with the granted observation time. Then we also need a list of stars to guide the telescope and to align the mask properly. Guide stars are used to correct for the rotation of the Earth throughout the observation so that the telescope is pointing at the same portion of the sky the entire time. You can see an example pointing in the first figure.

Figure 3: Zoom in to show the placement of slits on some targets. Objects with blue triangles have highest priority, next are objects with green boxes, and then those with white circles. The yellow vertical stripes overlaid on an object show where the slit will be placed and cut out of the mask. The horizontal white lines mark the extension of the dispersed light, i.e. the spectrum of the object. Basically, all the light that hits the disperser when it comes through the vertically extended slit, is dispersed in the horizontal direction.

Alignment stars are included on the mask to make sure all the slits are on the selected objects and not on some other piece of empty sky when the telescope operators define the pointing of the telescope. Then we take this image and list of targets and run them through the provided software for the given instrument.  Usually, the original list of targets leaves room for other objects to be placed on the mask as well, so we basically work with a prioritized list of objects. The highest priority objects are "forced" onto the mask into the space left after placements of the alignment stars to observe as many as possible of the desired targets. Then any available gaps are filled with objects of lower priority. In Figures 3 and 4 you can see all the slits that were placed on this particular mask and a zoom in that shows you a slit.

Figure 4: The finished mask. The red outline is the field of view of the instrument, the blue vertical lines mark the gaps in the detector. Each rectangle box shows where the spectrum of that object will extend. Yellow vertical lines mark the position of the slit on the selected object. The cyan rectangle boxes mark the position of the alignment stars.

After this, the observer can manually remove objects that received a slit if he/she wants the software to pick out a different object for example, one that might be more optimally placed. Then there are usually a few iterations in which the slit placement is refined a bit more and the maximum amount of objects are placed on the mask. And that's it, the mask is finished. All that is left to do is create all the masks for all the pointings in the same manner and then sending them off to the telescope and instrument support team for checking and approval. Once a mask is approved, all the necessary information is send to the mask cutting team who cut the mask, meaning all the tiny slits are cut out. After masks are cut, they will be installed in the instrument and then it's anxious waiting for us for the completion of your observations if they are carried out by the support astronomers at the observatory (Figure 5) or hoping for good weather if we go to the telescope ourselves to carry out the observations. 

The CANDELS fields are currently targeted by astronomers all over the world with many observational programs on instruments such as DEIMOS (on the Keck Telescope), MOSFIRE (on the Keck Telescope), GMOS (on the Gemini Telescopes, described in this post) and VIMOS (at the VLT, for example with the VIMOS UltraDeep Survey). 

Figure 5: Example observation from one of the GMOS masks. Each horizontal package of lines is the dispersed light from one slit. The bright vertical lines (a few are highlighted by the violet arrows) are emission lines caused by the night sky, meaning elements in our atmosphere emit light at certain wavelengths which are also detected and then overlap with the spectrum of the target object. The spectral traces of the target objects are highlighted by red arrows and are faint horizontal lines. In the red box, we can clearly see 2 bright dots, these are emission lines in the target object which we can use to determine its redshift and other properties. The green arrows point towards high energy cosmic rays that hit the detector and cause a detection. In order to retrieve the spectra for the target objects, astronomers have to remove the cosmic rays and subtract the spectrum of the night sky, so that ideally only the spectra of the real targets are left in the end.