Design of the WIYN High Resolution Infrared Camera (WHIRC)

Computer Science – Performance

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Scientific paper

The WIYN High Resolution Infrared Camera (WHIRC) is a high-resolution near-infrared imager (0.8-2.5 μm) designed to produce superb images over a moderate ( 3.3' × 3.4' ) field of view on the WIYN 3.5 m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. It takes scientific advantage of the excellent image quality produced by the telescope and its image stabilization subsystem, the WIYN Tip-Tilt Module (WTTM), which is located on one of two Nasmyth ports. WHIRC mounts to WTTM and reimages the WTTM focal plane to a plate scale of 0.1 ″ pixe l-1 at the WHIRC detector. Its straight-through optical path makes for a compact, very low mass, instrument-a necessity, given the stringent moment-loading requirement at the WTTM interface. The WHIRC optical path consists of a vacuum window, a five-element collimator, a dual filter wheel, a five-element achromatic camera, and a 2 k2 Raytheon VIRGO mercury cadmium telluride (HgCdTe) detector. A novel all-aluminum lens cell design is used to achieve 13 μm lens centering tolerances between ambient and the 77 K operating temperature. A suite of 13 filters facilitates broadband ( J , H , and Ks ) imaging, as well as narrowband imaging tailored to a variety of astronomical investigations. The imaging performance of WHIRC is excellent. Irrespective of seeing, the telescope, and WTTM, WHIRC delivers 0.13″, 0.11″, and 0.08″ FWHM images in J , H , and Ks , respectively. On sky, the imaging is equally impressive yielding images as good as ˜ 0.25 FWHM in Ks . In this article we describe the WHIRC design in detail and present the predicted and measured instrument performance.

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