[64.06] A New Prime Focus Camera for the Wyoming Infrared Telescope

AAS 200th meeting, Albuquerque, NM, June 2002
Session 64. New Developments in Ground Based Instrumentation
Display, Wednesday, June 5, 2002, 10:00am-7:00pm, SW Exhibit Hall

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[64.06] A New Prime Focus Camera for the Wyoming Infrared Telescope

M. J. Pierce, H. L. Nations (University of Wyoming)

We describe the new prime-focus, optical imaging camera for the Wyoming Infrared Observatory (WIRO). A 3-element Wynne corrector produces a well-corrected field of 18 arcmin at the f/2.1 focus of the 2.3-m primary of WIRO. The camera consists of a Marconi 2k x 2k detector housed in a camera/controller from Astronomical Research Cameras, Inc. The resulting scale of 0.6 arcsec per 13.5 um pixel is well-matched to the expected seeing for this site. The filter wheel, corrector position, and instrument focus are controlled using a GUI written in Visual Basic. We find this environment to be particularly efficient for simple instrumentation development. We present preliminary measures of the image quality and throughput for the camera as well as a brief description of some of the survey projects planned for this instrument.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: mpierce@uwyo.edu

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