KOALA, a wide-field 1000 element integral-field unit for the Anglo-Australian Telescope: assembly and commissioning

Abstract

The KOALA optical fibre feed for the AAOmega spectrograph has been commissioned at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The instrument samples the reimaged telescope focal plane at two scales: 1.23 arcsec and 0.70 arcsec per image slicing hexagonal lenslet over a 49x27 and 28x15 arcsec field of view respectively. The integral field unit consists of 2D hexagonal and circular lenslet arrays coupling light into 1000 fibres with 100 micron core diameter. The fibre run is over 35m long connecting the telescope Cassegrain focus with the bench mounted spectrograph room where all fibres are reformatted into a one-dimensional slit. Design and assembly of the KOALA components, engineering challenges encountered, and commissioning results are discussed.