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arXiv · 2405.00585

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope VIRUS Parallel Survey (HETVIPS)

Gregory R. Zeimann·Maya H. Debski·Donald P. Schneider·William P. Bowman·Niv Drory·Gary J. Hill·Hanshin Lee·Phillip MacQueen·Matthew Shetrone
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Abstract

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) VIRUS Parallel Survey (HETVIPS) is a blind spectroscopic program that sparsely covers approximately two-thirds of the celestial sphere and consists of roughly 252 million fiber spectra. The spectra were taken in parallel mode with the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS) instrument when the HET was observing a primary target with other HET facility instruments. VIRUS can simultaneously obtain approximately 35,000 spectra covering 3470A to 5540A at a spectral resolution of ~800. Although the vast majority of these spectra cover blank sky, we used the Pan-STARRS1 Data Release 2 Stacked Catalog to identify objects encompassed in the HETVIPS pointings and extract their spectra. This paper presents the first HETVIPS data release, containing 493,012 flux-calibrated spectra obtained through 31 March 2023, as well as a description of the data processing technique. Each of the object spectra were classified, resulting in a catalog of 74,196 galaxies, 4,087 quasars, 259,396 stars, and 154,543 unknown sources.

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Gregory R. Zeimann, Maya H. Debski, Donald P. Schneider, William P. Bowman, Niv Drory, Gary J. Hill, Hanshin Lee, Phillip MacQueen, Matthew Shetrone. 2024-05-01. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope VIRUS Parallel Survey (HETVIPS). https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357%2Fad35b8

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