The Taipan Galaxy Survey: Scientific Goals and Observing Strategy

Elisabete da Cunha; Andrew M Hopkins; Matthew Colless; Edward N Taylor; Chris Blake; Cullan Howlett; Christina Magoulas; John R Lucey; Claudia Lagos; Kyler Kuehn; Yjan Gordon; Dilyar Barat; Fuyan Bian; Christian Wolf; Michael J Cowley; Marc White; Ixandra Achitouv; Maciej Bilicki; Joss Bland-Hawthorn; Krzysztof Bolejko; Michael JI Brown; Rebecca Brown; Julia Bryant; Scott Croom; Tamara M Davis; Simon P Driver; Miroslav D Filipovic; Samuel R Hinton; Melanie Johnston-Hollitt; D Heath Jones; Baerbel Koribalski; Dane Kleiner; Jon Lawrence; Nuria Lorente; Jeremy Mould; Matt S Owers; Kevin Pimbblet; CG Tinney; Nicholas FH Tothill; Fred Watson

Journal article

The Taipan Galaxy Survey: Scientific Goals and Observing Strategy

Elisabete da Cunha, Andrew M Hopkins, Matthew Colless, Edward N Taylor, Chris Blake, Cullan Howlett, Christina Magoulas, John R Lucey, Claudia Lagos, Kyler Kuehn, Yjan Gordon, Dilyar Barat, Fuyan Bian, Christian Wolf, Michael J Cowley, Marc White, Ixandra Achitouv, Maciej Bilicki, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Krzysztof Bolejko Show all

PUBLICATIONS OF THE ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA | CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS | Published : 2017

DOI: 10.1017/pasa.2017.41

Abstract

The Taipan galaxy survey (hereafter simply 'Taipan') is a multi-object spectroscopic survey starting in 2017 that will cover 2π steradians over the southern sky (δ ≲ 10°, |b| ≥ 10°), and obtain optical spectra for about two million galaxies out to z < 0.4. Taipan will use the newly refurbished 1.2-m UK Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory with the new TAIPAN instrument, which includes an innovative 'Starbugs' positioning system capable of rapidly and simultaneously deploying up to 150 spectroscopic fibres (and up to 300 with a proposed upgrade) over the 6° diameter focal plane, and a purpose-built spectrograph operating in the range from 370 to 870nm with resolving power R≳;2 000. ..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Jeremy Mould Author Physics

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Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council

Awarded by Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO)

Awarded by Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)

Awarded by Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, NWO

Awarded by Science and Technology Facilities Council

Awarded by STFC

Funding Acknowledgements

We thank the referee for comments that helped us improve the clarity of the paper. We gratefully acknowledge funding support from the Australian Research Council through grants FT150100079 (EdC), DP160102075 (MC, CB), LE140100052 (MC), LP130100286 (JM), FL099213 (CW), DE150100618 (CL), FT140100255 (MSO), and FT140101270 (KB). Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) through project number CE110001020. JRL acknowledges support from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC; ST/P000541/1). MB is supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, NWO, through grant number 614.001.451. We thank Michael Goodwin for producing Figure 2, and Camila Pacifici and Stephane Charlot for supplying model fits to SDSS galaxy spectra to test our pipeline.