ZShooter

Keck I optical-IR spectrograph and imager

ZShooter is a Keck I workhorse in the making: an always-online optical-IR spectrograph plus a fast tri-band imager, built for decisive single-object science when timing, throughput, and wavelength leverage all matter at once.

It is intended to carry out observations that will bottleneck single-object astronomy in the Rubin era: fast response, broad wavelength coverage, high throughput, and spectral resolution useful well past first-look classification.

This site, like ZShooter, is actively evolving. It is here to do three jobs: clearly convey the concept, give the team a living technical home that keeps science and design stories clearly accessible, and affords both the team and future users and maintainers the resources they need to understand how to work with ZShooter.

Science

Why the instrument exists and what science cases are already shaping its design.

science.html

Requirements

A short table of the current design pressures.

requirements.html

Technical design

The post-CoDR architecture: where the instrument is, where it’s headed, and what is still open.

technical.html

Observing

Simulator, classical and ToO operations, data reduction.

observing.html

Program management

The useful part of the sausage-making: budgets, interfaces, WBS, and the things we keep forgetting.

program_management.html

Documents & tools

Formal docs, repos, boards, notebooks, shared tools, and the links everyone winds up needing.

documents_tools.html

Presentations & publications

Public-facing material, internal briefings, and references this site can aggregate cleanly for us.

presentations_publications.html

Contacts

Who we are.

contacts.html

Current design in a nutshell

• Always-online at Keck I Right Nasmyth for rapid response

• Two spectrometers (optical & nIR) / six channels (blue, green, red, yj, h, k)

• 2k x 2k active detector area per channel, qCCDs and LmAPDs.

• ZSpec + ZImager are a deliberately paired instrument, not two unrelated appendages

• AO-enhanced-seeing ready, optimized for natural seeing

A Zero-latency Spectrograph with High-throughput Optical-nIR Observing for Transient Exploration & Response

…so much more than X we had to skip Y.

Many of these pages are naturally mixed-use: useful to the team, useful to future students, eventually useful to observers and WMKO operations.