Hexabundles: imaging fibre arrays for low-light astronomical applications

Joss Bland-Hawthorn; Julia Bryant; Gordon Robertson; Peter Gillingham; John O'Byrne; Gerald Cecil; Roger Haynes; Scott Croom; Simon Ellis; Martin Maack; Peter Skovgaard; Danny Noordegraf

doi:10.1117/12.856345

20 July 2010 Hexabundles: imaging fibre arrays for low-light astronomical applications

Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Julia Bryant, Gordon Robertson, Peter Gillingham, John O'Byrne, Gerald Cecil, Roger Haynes, Scott Croom, Simon Ellis, Martin Maack, Peter Skovgaard, Danny Noordegraf

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 7735, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy III; 773541 (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.856345
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2010, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

We demonstrate for the first time an imaging fibre bundle ("hexabundle") that is suitable for low-light applications in astronomy. The most successful survey instruments at optical-infrared wavelengths today have obtained data on up to a million celestial sources using hundreds of multimode fibres at a time fed to multiple spectrographs. But a large fraction of these sources are spatially extended on the celestial sphere such that a hexabundle would be able to provide spectroscopic information at many distinct locations across the source. Our goal is to upgrade single-fibre survey instruments with multimode hexabundles in place of the multimode fibres. We discuss two varieties of hexabundles: (i) closely packed circular cores allowing the covering fraction to approach the theoretical maximum of 91%; (ii) fused noncircular cores where the interstitial holes have been removed and the covering fraction approaches 100%. In both cases, we find that the cladding can be reduced to ~2μm over the short fuse length, well below the conventional ~10λ thickness employed more generally. We discuss the relative merits of fused/unfused hexabundles in terms of manufacture and deployment, and present our first on-sky observations.

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Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Julia Bryant, Gordon Robertson, Peter Gillingham, John O'Byrne, Gerald Cecil, Roger Haynes, Scott Croom, Simon Ellis, Martin Maack, Peter Skovgaard, and Danny Noordegraf "Hexabundles: imaging fibre arrays for low-light astronomical applications", Proc. SPIE 7735, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy III, 773541 (20 July 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.856345

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