Antarctica – a case for 3D-spectroscopy

DS or Integral-Field Spectroscopy (IFS) provides multiple spectra for each point of a 2-D field, rather than along a narrow, 1-D spectrograph slit only. Therefore, IFS does not require very accurate telescope pointing, nor do pre-assumptions about slit or aperture sizes have to be made. It avoids any ‘slit-losses’ due to seeing or atmospheric dispersion, which eliminates the need for any parallactic alignment or a dispersion compensator (see Fig. 1).