The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) Survey Design, Reductions, and Detections

Understand

We describe the survey design, calibration, commissioning, and emission-line detection algorithms for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX).

• The goal of HETDEX is to measure the redshifts of over a million Ly$\alpha$ emitting galaxies between 1.88<z<3.52, in a 540 deg^2 area encompassing a co-moving volume of 10.9 Gpc^3.
• No pre-selection of targets is involved; instead the HETDEX measurements are accomplished via a spectroscopic survey using a suite of wide-field integral field units distributed over the focal plane of the telescope.
• This survey measures the Hubble expansion parameter and angular diameter distance, with a final expected accuracy of better than 1%.