United Kingdom Infrared Telescope
The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) is an astronomical telescope specializing in infrared observations with a primary mirror diameter of 3.8 m at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.
UKIRT was owned by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council until 2014 and operated from the Joint Astronomy Center in Hilo , Hawaii. It was designed in the 1970s as a relatively inexpensive telescope for observations in the infrared range between 1 and 30 micrometers wavelength and went into operation in 1979. The infrared detector technology available at the time made lower demands on the image quality than with optical telescopes, so that, for example, the main mirror could be made thin and light. Since then it has been adapted to today's requirements through various upgrading measures and typically delivers an image quality below an arc second in the near infrared. UKIRT is still the world's largest telescope fully specialized in infrared observations, even if it is now surpassed in many performance characteristics by optical-infrared telescopes of the 8-meter class such as the Very Large Telescope .
Instruments
The instrumentation of the UKIRT has been modernized many times since it was commissioned. In 2008 it consisted of three instruments for the Cassegrain focus and a camera with a large field of view in front of the Cassegrain focus.
- CGS4 is a cooled grating spectrometer with a slit length of 90 arc seconds and a spectral resolution between 1,000 and 30,000.
- UFTI is a 1024 × 1024 pixel camera for wavelengths between 0.8 and 2.5 micrometers.
- UIST is a 1024 × 1024 pixel camera with a spectrometer for wavelengths between 0.8 and 5 micrometers, with an additional field imaging mode for a field of 3 × 6 arc seconds.
- WFCAM is a camera with a large field of view with four 2048 × 2048 pixel chips, each of which covers a field with a side length of around 13.6 arc minutes, i.e. together around 0.2 square degrees.
Current operation
Since WFCAM went into operation in 2004, the most important project at UKIRT has been the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS), which takes up about 80% of the time available in large field mode with WFCAM. WFCAM uses about 60% of the telescope time, the remaining 40% are used for observations with the Cassegrain instruments. A change or restriction of the operation from 2009 is under discussion.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ STFC ProgRev and UKIRT 08A / B - Update 4 ( Memento of the original from December 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Coordinates: 19 ° 49 ′ 21 ″ N , 155 ° 28 ′ 14.5 ″ W.