About the Logo

The FastSound logo was designed to represent two objects related to our project: a galaxy (our target) and echidna (an animal, spiny ant eater living in Australia).

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Echidna is a symbol of FMOS, and actually the name of a part of it. FMOS has 400 fibers, allowing it to simultaneously take spectra of 400 astronomical objects. The "echidna" of FMOS is the controling system of 400 fiber ends (spines) at the prime focus of the Subaru Telescope. The 400 spines look like a echidna.

This is FMOS "echidna".

When an FMOS observation is made, the FMOS echidna works to locate each spine to the locations of target astronomical objects. Light captured by the spines goes to the two FMOS spectrographs (IRS1 and IRS2) through fibers.