We present a performance analysis of SparsePak and the WIYN Bench Spectrograph for precision studies of stellar and ionized gas kinematics of external galaxies .
We focus on spectrograph configurations with echelle and low-order gratings yielding spectral resolutions of \sim 10000 between 500-900nm .
These configurations are of general relevance to the spectrograph performance .
Benchmarks include spectral resolution , sampling , vignetting , scattered light , and an estimate of the system absolute throughput .
Comparisons are made to other , existing , fiber feeds on the WIYN Bench Spectrograph .
Vignetting and relative throughput are found to agree with a geometric model of the optical system .
An aperture-correction protocol for spectrophotometric standard-star calibrations has been established using independent WIYN imaging data and the unique capabilities of the SparsePak fiber array .
The WIYN point-spread-function is well-fit by a Moffat profile with a constant power-law outer slope of index -4.4 .
We use SparsePak commissioning data to debunk a long-standing myth concerning sky-subtraction with fibers : By properly treating the multi-fiber data as a “ long-slit ” it is possible to achieve precision sky subtraction with a signal-to-noise performance as good or better than conventional long-slit spectroscopy .
No beam-switching is required , and hence the method is efficient .
Finally , we give several examples of science measurements which SparsePak now makes routine .
These include H \alpha velocity fields of low surface-brightness disks , gas and stellar velocity-fields of nearly face-on disks , and stellar absorption-line profiles of galaxy disks at spectral resolutions of \sim 24,000 .