The Hobby-Eberly Telescope VIRUS Parallel Survey (HETVIPS)

TL;DR

The HETVIPS project is a large-scale spectroscopic survey using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope to collect and classify millions of spectra, significantly expanding the available astronomical data for galaxies, quasars, and stars.

Contribution

This paper presents the first data release of the HETVIPS survey, including 493,012 spectra and a detailed data processing and classification methodology.

Findings

Collected 493,012 flux-calibrated spectra

Classified spectra into galaxies, quasars, stars, and unknown sources

Created a comprehensive catalog for astronomical research

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.