Arrayed wide-angle camera system for wide field imaging and spectroscopy on ELTs: proof-of-concept on-sky test results on McDonald Observatory 2.7m telescope

The next generation Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) are promising a profound transformation of our understanding of the universe through large-scale surveys of a myriad of previously unseen astronomical objects across cosmic space-time. For such surveys, the ELTs will need a super-efficient field corrector (FC) that can expand their field of view over a broad wavelength range, thus enabling multi-object spectroscopy using multiple back-end instruments. Arrayed Wide-Angle Camera System (AWACS) is built on the segmented FC architecture that can break the limits of monolithic design in scaling to the ELTs and beyond. AWACS accomplishes desired field expansion via a suite of small cost-effective electro-opto-mechanical units over a telescope’s focal surface that compensates for telescope field aberrations and atmospheric dispersion, locally and simultaneously. We constructed a dual-unit proof-of-concept AWACS and tested the adaptive aberration correction on sky as detailed in this paper.