Conceptual

Fiber Integral Field Unit for the Binospec Spectrograph

The design and 2023 commissioning of an optical-fiber integral field unit (IFU) for Binospec, the wide-field 360-1000 nm spectrograph on the 6.5m MMT. A hexagonal lenslet array (0.6 arcsec pitch) samples a contiguous 12x16 arcsec field with 640 fibers (150 micron cores subtending 0.90 arcsec), plus 80 sky fibers in an 11.8 arcsec aperture; the fibers reformat the 2D field onto two pseudo-slits feeding the two Binospec channels. The unit fits within a standard slit-mask frame so it can be interchanged with slit-mask, long-slit, and IFU observing, and three gratings deliver spectral resolution R from about 2000 to 6000.