andrea belfiore
I am an astronomer with a background as a software programmer. I graduated in physics from the University of Pavia in Italy, and in 2012 I got my PhD, working at UCSC on the blind search for gamma-ray pulsars with Fermi-LAT. Although I am mostly interested in high-energy astrophysics, particularly pulsars and various aspects of statistics, I am going to talk here about a side project: the software to prepare observations with a multi-fibre spectrometer. This challenge has taken me the last few years, leading to some interesting algorithms and statistical tools, and it is coming to an end as we approach its delivery, and MOONS will start taking data.
Session
MOONS is an optical near-infrared multi-fiber spectrograph to be
mounted on the ESO VLT. Its Field of View of 25 arcmin in diameter
is covered by ~1000 robotic Fiber Positioner Units. To fully exploit
such a high multiplexing, while accounting for hardware constraints,
the observing conditions and setup, and the user preferences is a
challenge. While the astronomer can assign priorities to targets and
tune it, the process of fiber allocation must be automated. By defining
a figure of merit and isolating the hardware-specific features, this task
reduces to a complex discrete optimisation problem. I will describe the
algorithms and the logic behind the MOONS target allocation
software which will be offered with the instrument.