ENABLING FAINTER ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATIONS THROUGH SKY SUBTRACTION AND INSTRUMENTAL PERFORMANCE

The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is an massively multiplexed ber fed in- strument which will work in the visible to the near infra-red (NIR). PFS has three primary science goals in cosmology, extragalactic astronomy, and galactic archeology. For PFS to succeed it will be necessary to subtract the sky back- ground to a precision which has not been achieved before, and to achieve a high instrumental throughput. This thesis begins with an examination of astronomical spectra, and in par- ticular the atmospheric airglow background. The types of sky subtraction errors will be examined, and a method for removing sky subtraction errors is imple- mented. A deeper analysis of atmospheric airglow is performed using astro- nomical sky spectra, and its temporal behavior is quanti ed on multiple time scales. The last part of this thesis will detail the infrastructure to assemble and characterize the charge coupled devices (CCD) and the complimentary metal oxide semi-conductor (CMOS) devices for PFS. I have been able to align the CCD focal plane arrays (FPA) such that their deviation from atness is less than one half of the given instrumental tolerance. The characterization of these devices has shown that they meet instrumental performance requirements. The vast majority of visible and near infrared astronomical instruments built today and in the near future will leverage the high e ciency and low noise performance of CCDs and CMOS devices to enable science in new parameter spaces