The Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) will soon be the first massively multiplexed wide-field spectrograph on an 8-meter class telescope. PFS’s spectrograph system covers the optical to near-infrared—380 to 1260 nm—in a single exposure and is fed by 2394 reconfigurable fibers distributed across a 1.3-degree wide field of view. Building upon deep multiband imaging catalogs, particularly from Subaru’s Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) imager, PFS will fuel future discoveries in cosmology, galaxy evolution, and galactic archaeology. To fully leverage Subaru’s 8.2 meter aperture and probe the faintest targets, accurate spectral reduction and sky subtraction are critical to PFS’s operation. During commissioning of PFS, the accuracy of the sky-subtraction algorithms is being assessed through direct observations of the night sky. In this paper, we report the current status of the sky-subtraction routines, as determined from the commissioning data.
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