The AAO fiber instrument data simulator

摘要

The fiber instrument data simulator is an in-house software tool that simulates detector images of fiber-fed spectrographsdeveloped by the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO). In addition to helping validate the instrument designs,the resulting simulated images are used to develop the required data reduction software. Example applications that havebenefited from the tool usage are the HERMES and SAMI instrumental projects for the Anglo-Australian Telescope(AAT). Given the sophistication of these projects an end-to-end data simulator that accurately models the predicteddetector images is required. The data simulator encompasses all aspects of the transmission and optical aberrations of thelight path: from the science object, through the atmosphere, telescope, fibers, spectrograph and finally the cameradetectors. The simulator runs under a Linux environment that uses pre-calculated information derived from ZEMAXmodels and processed data from MATLAB. In this paper, we discuss the aspects of the model, software, examplesimulations and verification.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.