We present here a fast code for creating a synthetic survey of the Milky Way. Given one or more color-magnitude bounds, a survey size, and geometry, the code returns a catalog of stars in accordance with a given model of the Milky Way. The model can be specified by a set of density distributions or as an N-body realization. We provide fast and efficient algorithms for sampling both types of models.

Stellar populations in galaxies are vast repositories of fossil information. In recent years it has become possible to consider high resolution spectroscopic surveys of millions of stars. New high resolution multi-object spectrographs on 4-8m class telescopes (HERMES, WFMOS) will allow us for the first time to make large and detailed chemical abundance surveys of stars in the Galactic disk, bulge and halo, and apply the techniques of chemical tagging to recovering the fossil information left over from galaxy assembly.

The Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey is a large high-resolution spectroscopic survey using the newly commissioned High Efficiency and Resolution Multi-Element Spectrograph (HERMES) on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The HERMES spectrograph provides high-resolution (R~28 000) spectra in four passbands for 392 stars simultaneously over a 2 deg field of view. The goal of the survey is to unravel the formation and evolutionary history of the Milky Way, using fossil remnants of ancient star formation events which have been disrupted and are now dispersed throughout the Galaxy.

Paper PDF: 

MNRAS-2015-De Silva-2604-17.pdf