AutoFib2+WYFFOS (AF2) is the multi-object, wide-field,
fibre spectrograph working at the Prime focus of the 4.2m
William Herschel Telescope (WHT). It contains
150 science fibres each of 1.6 arcsec diameter, and 10 fiducial bundles for
acquisition and guiding. At the Prime focus, the fibres are placed onto a
field plate by the robot positioner Autofib2 at user-defined sky coordinates.
Object light is transmitted along fibres 26 metres in length to the Wide
Field Fibre Optical Spectrograph (WYFFOS). The path from Prime focus to the spectrograph
consists of a prism, fibre button, 26 metres of fibre, finger, microlens
and the facet block.
News:
November 02, 2010: New Solaris and Linux versions of af2_configure are available. They are able to automatically retrieve the latest AF2 fibre and telescope .dat files, and also warn you if less than 3 fiducial fibres are allocated. Also, check out the new af2_configure Users Guide.
October 20, 2010: A completely new AF2 data reduction pipeline and quicklook is under development! Based on IDL and usable through a simple GUI, it will be able to perform automatic
quicklook of your data while at the telescope, as well as full data reduction. The estimated arrival time for the pipeline is October 1, 2011.
October 20, 2010: A new Hg lamp for performing wavelength calibration in echelle mode orders 6 and 7 is available! This removes the previous limitation to use the high resolution echelle mode
with wavelengths shorter than 4500 Angstrom.
