The optical performance of LAMOST telescope

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LAMOST (Large sky Area Multi-Object fiber Spectroscopic Telescope) is a Chinese national scientific research facility operated by National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC). After two years of commissioning beginning in 2009, the telescope, instruments, software systems and operations are nearly ready to begin the main science survey. Through a spectral survey of millions of objects in much of the northern sky, LAMOST will enable research in a number of contemporary cutting edge topics in astrophysics, such as: discovery of the first generation stars in the Galaxy, pinning down the formation and evolution history of galaxies especially the Milky Way and its central massive black hole, looking for signatures of dark matter distribution and possible sub-structures in the Milky Way halo. To maximize the scientific potential of the facility, wide national participation and international collaboration has been emphasized. The survey has two major components: the LAMOST ExtraGAlactic Survey (LEGAS), and the LAMOST Experiment for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (LEGUE). Until LAMOST reaches its full capability, the LEGUE portion of the survey will use the available observing time, starting in 2012. An overview of the LAMOST project and the survey that will be carried out in next five to six years is presented in this paper. The science plan for the whole LEGUE survey, instrumental specifications, site conditions, the descriptions of the current on-going pilot survey, including its footprints and target selection algorithm, will be presented as separate papers in this volume.

Section: General Layoutmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

LAMOST spectral survey — An overview

Zhao

Chu

et al. 2012

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“…The Guo Shou Jing Telescope (also named Large sky Area Multi-Object fiber Spectroscopic Telescope, or LAMOST) is a quasi-meridian reflecting Schmidt telescope with a 4-meter aperture, a 5-degree field of view, and 4000 fibers installed on the focal plane (Cui et al 2010; see also the overview by Zhao et al 2012). It will be used as a spectroscopic survey telescope for Galactic (Deng et al 2012) and cosmological science.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The site conditions of the Guo Shou Jing Telescope

Yao¹,

Liu²,

Zhang³

et al. 2012

The weather at Xinglong Observing Station, where the Guo Shou Jing Telescope (GSJT) is located, is strongly affected by the monsoon climate in north-east China. The LAMOST survey strategy is constrained by these weather patterns. In this paper, we present a statistics on observing hours from 2004 to 2007, and the sky brightness, seeing, and sky transparency from 1995 to 2011 at the site. We investigate effects of the site conditions on the survey plan. Operable hours each month shows strong correlation with season: on average there are 8 operable hours per night available in December, but only 1-2 hours in July and August. The seeing and the sky transparency also vary with seasons. Although the seeing is worse in windy winters, and the atmospheric extinction is worse in the spring and summer, the site is adequate for the proposed scientific program of LAMOST survey. With a Monte Carlo simulation using historical data on the site condition, we find that the available observation hours constrain the survey footprint from 22 h to 16 h in right ascension; the sky brightness allows LAMOST to obtain the limit magnitude of V = 19.5 mag with S/N = 10.

“…Thirdly, it is very difficult to obtain reliable distances to individual stars. However, the Guo Shou Jing Telescope (formerly called the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope LAMOST; Wang et al 1996;Su et al 1998;Xing et al 1998;Zhao 2000;Cui et al 2004;Zhu et al 2006;Cui et al 2010; c.f. http://www.lamost.org/website/en/) and Gaia together provide a great opportunity in advancing studies of the Milky Way in the coming years.…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

The assembly of the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies

Smith

Okamoto

Yuan

et al. 2012

In recent years it has become clear that the Milky Way is an important testing ground for theories of galaxy formation. Much of this growth has been driven by large surveys, both photometric and spectroscopic, which are producing vast and rich catalogs of data. Through the analysis of these data sets we can gain new and detailed insights into the physical processes which shaped the Milky Way's evolution. This review will discuss a number of these developments, first focusing on the disk of the Milky Way, and then looking at its satellite population. The importance of surveys has not gone unnoticed by the Chinese astronomy community and in the final section we discuss a number of Chinese projects that are set to play a key role in the development of this field.