Flux-Calibrated Emission-Line Imaging of Extended Sources Using GTC/OSIRIS Tunable Filters11Based on observations made with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), installed in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, in the island of La Palma.

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe investigate the utility of the tunable filters (TFs) for obtaining flux-calibrated emission-line maps of extended objects such as galactic nebulae and nearby galaxies using the Optical System for Imaging and low Resolution Integrated Spectroscopy (OSIRIS) at the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC). Despite the relatively large field of view (FoV) of OSIRIS (8′ × 8′), the change in wavelength across the field (∼80 Å) and the long tail of the TF spectral response function are hindrances for obtaining accurate flux-calibrated emission-line maps of extended sources. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that emission-line maps useful for diagnostics of nebulae can be generated over the entire FoV of OSIRIS if we make use of theoretically well-understood characteristics of TFs. We have successfully generated the flux-calibrated images of the nearby large late-type spiral galaxy M101 in the emission lines of Hα, [N II]λ6583, [S II]λ6716 and [S II]λ6731. We find that the present uncertainty in setting the central wavelength of TFs (∼1 Å) is the biggest source of error in the emission-line fluxes. By comparing the Hα fluxes of H II regions in our images with the fluxes derived from Hα images obtained using narrow-band filters, we estimate an error of ∼11% in our fluxes. The flux-calibration of the images was carried out by fitting the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) griz magnitudes of in-frame stars with the stellar spectra from the SDSS spectral database. This method resulted in an accuracy of 3% in flux-calibration of any narrow-band image, which is as good as, if not better than, what has been feasible using the observations of spectrophotometric standard stars. Thus time-consuming calibration images need not be taken. A user-friendly script under the IRAF environment was developed and is available on request.