2dF is a pick-and-place style fibre positioning system mounted at the AAT prime focus. It is designed to allow the acquisition of up to 392 simultaneous spectra of objects anywhere within a two degree field on the sky. It consists of a wide-field corrector, an atmospheric dispersion compensator and a robot gantry which positions optical fibres to 0.3 arcseconds on the sky. A tumbling mechanism with two field plates allows the next field to be configured while the current field is being observed.
This system, commissioned in 1997 has proven extremely reliable (total downtime less than 4% without any major refurbishments). Over the last 5 years the 2df/AAOmega system has occupied the majority of available telescope time at the AAT and has been used to conduct a series of high profile science projects.
