Palomar 200-inch Telescope:

WIRC - Wide field IR Camera

Status: Observatory Instrument

What's New (as of April 2014)

• Detector was replaced due to a catastrophic failure of the original H2.

• Some detector characteristics have changed:
  (this will be updated as more information becomes available)

  • Quadrant 1 is non-uniform accros the channel.
  • The detector is linear is up to 21,000 adu.

What's New (as of August 2007)

• The pickup noise in WIRC images has been eliminated. Read noise is now 12 e^- in a standard CDS image

• The detector read mode has been changed from a global reset-read to a line by line reset-read. As a result, observers may notice two small differences:

  • A dark image has a stronger spatial signal gradient. This effect is stable and subtracts away.
  • The full frame exposure time is now 3.23 seconds, not 3.25.
  • The best linearity is between 3,000 adu and 36,000 adu.

Paper:

• Please reference this SPIE paper:
  
  Full SPIE paper
  
  PDF file

Telescope:

• 200" prime focus, f/3.3

• Field of view 8.7 arcminutes on a side

Detector:

• 2048 x 2048 Hawaii-II HgCdTe

• gain 5.467 e^-/adu

• Dark current ~0.048 adu/s = ~0.26 e^-/s

  (due to slight filter leak, dome must be dark when taking dark frames)

• read noise ; 12 e^-

• frame rate (shortest exposure time for full array) = 3.23 seconds

Scale:

• 0.2487 arcsec/pixel (residuals = rms 0.286" RA and 0.296" Dec)

• The camera is rotated 1.39 degrees relative to N and E directly along rows and columns

• This information is provided by Dave Thompson, see his email

Filters: Standard Setup

For an excellent set of WIRC filter transmission profiles put together by J. Wilson and L. Smith, U. of Virginia go to;