The Oxford SWIFT Spectrograph

The SWIFT Spectrograph Home Page

The Oxford SWIFT instrument is an I and z band integral field spectrograph that has been successfully commissioned as a common user facility at the 200 inch Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain in October 2008. At first commissioning, SWIFT was assisted by the Palomar Adaptive Optics System PALMAO, which provided both Natural Guide Star (NGS) and Laser Guide Star (LGS) adaptive optics correction to SWIFT.

Following the upgrade of the Palomar Adaptive Optics system to P3K in 2011, SWIFT was successfully re-deployed in late 2011, adding a 16 milli-arcsecond spatial pixel scale, to make full use of the extreme adaptive optics correction provided by P3K.

It is now available for general use by all members of the Palomar User Community.

SWIFT can also be used without adaptive optics correction, although the P3K beam relay is always used to deliver light to SWIFT.

In 2012, SWIFT has been equipped with an off-axis guider, which allows using guide stars up to Rmag ∼ 20 over a 1 arc-minute field of view to ensure excellent tracking over long exposures (15 − 20 mins), and provides the ability to register several long exposure cubes, where the object cannot be detected in a single exposure (either line or continuum).

• Technical Specifications
• Expected Performance with P3K AO
• Sensitivity
• Key Science Programs
• Commissioning
• Pictures
• Talks
• Results
• Team Members

For Observers

• Calls for Proposals
• Operations
• Guider
• Calibration
• User Manuals
• Pipeline

Last modified 13 Sep 2013