Accurate estimate of the ESPRESSO fibre-injection losses inferred from integrated field-stabilization images

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ground-based astronomy is unavoidably subject to the adverse effect of atmospheric turbulence, a.k.a. the seeing, which blurs the images and limits the achievable spatial resolution. For spectroscopic observations, it leads to slit or fibre-injection losses, since not all photons distributed over the extended seeing disc can be captured. These losses might have a very substantial impact on the overall efficiency of a spectrograph and are naturally highly variable. Assessing the fibre-injection losses requires accurate information about the image quality (IQ) delivered by the telescope to the instrument over the course of the observations, which, however, is often not directly available. ESPRESSO provides acquisition and field-stabilization images attached to the science data and thus offers the opportunity for a post-processing analysis. Here, we present a novel method to infer the IQ profile and fibre-injection losses from the integrated field-stabilization images, utilizing the spill-over light that does not get injected into the fibre. We validate these measurements against the IQ observed in the acquisition images and determine that our method delivers unbiased estimates with a scatter of 0.11 arcsec for the FWHM of the profile and $15~{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ in terms of fibre-injection losses. This compares favourably to the estimates derived from either the differential image motion monitor or the telescope guide probe sensors and therefore represents a valuable tool to characterize the instrument efficiency and to correct raw spectra for fibre-injection losses.