| FIREBall (Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon) is a 1-m telescope combined with the first fiber-fed ultraviolet spectrograph, flown on a short duration scientific balloon. FIREBall is designed to map metal (CIV and OVI) and Lyman alpha emission from the warm-hot (105 -- 10 6 K) intergalactic medium at 0.3 < z < 1.0, and 1950 A < lambda < 2205 A.;The experiment has had two balloon flights. The first was an engineering flight from Palestine, TX, in July 2007. In this flight we confirmed the functionality of the experiment, observing several UV bright stars. The second flight was in June 2009, from Fort Sumner, NM. During this flight several science targets were observed. Both flights are described here, as well as the initial analysis of the data from the second flight. We use sensitivity measurements from the data to put initial constraints on recent models of expected emission, and measure the angular correlation function of the data fields in an attempt to detect and map the line emission from warm intergalactic gas.;This thesis describes the experiment and focuses on the design, building, and implementation of the spectrograph. The spectrograph contains 280 science fibers to observe across the 2.3 arcminute diameter field. The Offner spectrograph uses a spherical mirror, a convex holographically ruled grating, and a legacy GALEX NUV micro-channel plate detector, all of which contribute to the simple optical design. |
