Number and Distribution of Fiducial Fibres in a Spectroscopic Survey Telescope
Abstract To date, the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) has been in operation for 12 years. To improve the telescope’s astronomical observation accuracy, the original open-loop fibre positioning system of LAMOST is in urgent need of upgrading. The upgrade plan is to locate several fibre view cameras (FVCs) around primary mirror B to build a closed-loop feedback control system. The FVCs are ~20 m from the focal surface. To reduce a series of errors when the cameras detect the positions of the optical fibres, we designed fiducial fibres on the focal surface to be fiducial points for the cameras. Increasing the number of fiducial fibres can improve the detection accuracy of the FVC system, but it will also certainly reduce the number of fibre positioners that can be used for observation. Therefore, the focus of this paper is how to achieve the quantity and distribution that meet the requirements of system detection. In this paper, we introduce the necessity of using fiducial fibres, propose a method for selecting their number, and present several methods for assessing the uniformity of their distribution. Finally, we use particle swarm optimization to find the best distribution of fiducial fibres.