Developments in fibre positioning technology for the WEAVE instrument for the William Herschel Telescope

Conference item

WEAVE is the next-generation wide-field optical spectroscopy facility for the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) on La Palma in the Canary Islands, Spain. It is a multi-object "pick-and-place" fibre-fed spectrograph with a 1000 fibre multiplex behind a new dedicated 2° prime focus corrector. The WEAVE positioner concept uses two robots working in tandem in order to reconfigure a fully populated field within the expected 1 hour dwell-time for the instrument (a good match between the required exposure times and the limit of validity for a given configuration due to the effects of differential refraction). In this paper we describe some of the final design decisions arising from the prototyping phase of the instrument design and provide an update on the current manufacturing status of the fibre positioner system.

Authors: Schallig, E; Lewis, I; Gilbert, J; Dalton, G; Brock, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (
• Host title: Proceedings of SPIE
• Journal: Proceedings of SPIE
• Volume: 9908
• Article number: 99087U
• Publication date: 2016-08-01
• Acceptance date: 2016-07-20
• DOI: 10.1117/12.2231626
• ISSN: 1996-756X
• Keywords: robotic positioners; fibre spectroscopy; WEAVE; high multiplex spectroscopy; WHT