PANIC: a near-infrared camera for the Magellan telescopes
Abstract
PANIC (Persson's Auxiliary Nasmyth Infrared Camera) is a near-infrared camera designed to operate at any one of the f/11 folded ports of the 6.5m Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. The instrument is built around a simple, all-refractive design that reimages the Magellan focal plane to a plate scale of 0.125"/pixel onto a Rockwell 1024x1024 HgCdTe detector. The design goals for PANIC included excellent image quality to sample the superb seeing measured with the Magellan telescopes, high throughput, a relatively short construction time, and low cost. PANIC has now been in regular operation for over one year and has proved to be highly reliable and produce excellent images. The best recorded image quality has been ~0.2" FWHM.
- Publication:
-
Ground-based Instrumentation for Astronomy
- Pub Date:
- September 2004
- DOI:
- 10.1117/12.551828
- arXiv:
- arXiv:astro-ph/0406666
- Bibcode:
- 2004SPIE.5492.1653M
- Keywords:
-
- Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 8 pages, 5 figures. To appear in "Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation," Proc SPIE (Glasgow), June 2004. Version with higher resolution figures is available at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~pmartini/professional/publications/panic.pdf