Realizing the potential of the Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper: Calibration methods and on-sky performance

TL;DR

The paper evaluates the Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper's on-sky performance, focusing on calibration techniques and its ability to map faint, large-scale emission lines in the local Universe.

Contribution

It introduces calibration methods and demonstrates the on-sky performance of an innovative all-refracting telescope for ultra-low surface brightness mapping.

Findings

Effective sky background subtraction achieved

Successful wavelength calibration demonstrated

High-fidelity flat-fielding methods validated

Abstract

The Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper is an innovative all-refracting telescope designed to carry out ultra-low surface brightness wide-field mapping of visible wavelength line emission. Equipped with ultranarrowband (0.8 nm bandwidth) filters mounted in Dragonfly Filter-Tilter instrumentation, the Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper maps H$\alpha$, [NII]$\lambda$6583, and [OIII]$\lambda$5007 line emission produced by structures with sizes ranging from $\sim$1 to 1000 kpc in the local Universe. These spatial scales encompass that of the exceedingly diffuse and faintly radiating circumgalactic medium, which is singularly difficult to detect with conventional mirror-based telescope instrumentation. Extremely careful control of systematics is required to directly image these large scale structures, necessitating high fidelity sky background subtraction, wavelength calibration, and specialized flat-fielding methods. In this paper, we discuss the on-sky performance of the Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper with these methods in place.