A wide Field Camera for the United Kingdom Infrared telescope

摘要

This paper describes an ambitious new wide field infrared camera (WFCAM) for the 3.8 m United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT), located on Mauna Kea; hawaii; The camera; currently under design at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, will include 4 2048x2048 pixel focal plae array IR detectors operating over a wavelength range of 1-2.5 mu m. The optics provide a 1 deg diameter corrected field of view and a pixel scale of 0.4 arcsec per pixel. A novel Schmidt type optical design allows the large field to be imaged with excellent image quality. The optical design includes a cold stop to maximise rejection of background radiation and stray light. Precise microstepping will be used to improve sampling. Four parallel data acquistion and processing channels will be used to cope with the large data rates expected. It is envisaged that a substantial fraction of UKIRT time will be devoted to large area ksy surveys once WFCAM is operational, resulting in a unique IR catalogue containing hundreds of millions of objects.