2003•Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIERequires access
Design status of WFCAM: a wide field camera for the UK infrared telescope
David Henry, M. Casali, David Montgomery, Keith Burch, Ken Laidlaw, Derek J. Ives, Andrew Vick, Alan Bridger, D. Lunney, A. J. Adamson, Nicholas P. Rees, Tomas Chylek, Timothy C. Chuter
Open publisher page 14 citations
Abstract
An update on the design status of the UKIRT Wide Field Camera (WFCAM) is presented. WFCAM is a wide field infrared camera for the UK Infrared Telescope, designed to produce large scale infrared surveys. The complete system consists of a new IR camera with integral autoguider and a new tip/tilt secondary mirror unit. WFCAM is being designed and built by a team at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh, supported by the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii. The camera uses a novel quasi-Schmidt camera type design, with the camera mounted above the UKIRT primary mirror. The optical system operates over 0.7 - 2.4 μm and has a large corrected field of view of 0.9° diameter. The focal plane is sparsely populated with 4 2K x 2K Rockwell HAWAII-2 MCT array detectors, giving a pixel scale of 0.4 arcsec/pixel. A separate autoguider CCD is integrated into the focal plane unit. Parallel detector controllers are used, one for each of the four IR arrays and a fifth for the autoguider CCD.