VIRUS Parallel Observations with the Hobby Eberly Telescope

The VIRUS spectrograph will be installed on the upgraded Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in the Spring of 2012. This instrument will feature an array of integral field units and will be used primarily to conduct a survey for the HET Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). The VIRUS instrument will be configured to allow parallel observations during the times when the High-, Medium-and Low-Resolution Spectrographs are operating as the primary instruments on HET. This parallel mode of observing will be enabled long after HETDEX is completed and VIRUS becomes a service instrument on HET. In an effort to explore various scientific uses for such parallel data, we have taken the record of all HET observations for the years 2003 through 2009 and estimated the sky coverage that VIRUS parallel data would have provided. We have used the IFU footprint of VIRUS as it is currently configured, and all observations with …