THE ON-CHIP GUIDING SYSTEM OF THE WIDE-FIELD INFRARED CAMEA AT CFHT

摘要

The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) is commissioning a new Wide field Infrared Camera (WIRCam) that uses a mosaic of 4 HAWAII-2RG near-infrared detectors manufactured by Rockwell. At the heart of the instrument is an On-Chip Guiding System (OCGS) that exploits the unique parallel science/guide frame readout capability of the HAWAII-2RG detectors. A small subsample of each array is continuously read at a rate of 50 Hz while the integration of the science image is ongoing with the full arrays. Each of these guiding windows is centered on a star to provide an error signal for the telescope guiding. An Image Stabilizer Unit (ISU) (i.e. a tip-tilt silica plate), provides the corrections. A Proportional Integral Differential (PID) closed loop controls the ISU such that telescope tracking is corrected at a rate of 5 Hz. The guide window size and readout rate are adjustable but typical numbers are 8x8-16x16 boxes read at 50 or 1.5 Hz. This paper presents the technical architecture of the guiding system and performance measurements on the sky with WIRCam.