HAWK-I and Infrared Imaging on the VLT
Abstract
HAWK-I, the High Accuity Wide-field K-band Imager, will be a near-optimum camera for the VLT. The 7.5 arcminute square field is practically the largest IR field possible at Nasmyth while keeping reasonably uniform sensitivity in all bands. The mosaic of four 2k×2k detectors which fills this field has a pixel scale of 0.1 arcsec/pixel, which is sufficiently small to adequately sample the best seeing at Paranal, even with future ground layer adaptive optics correction. An all-reflective optical design gives very high throughput. The end result is an imager with the best possible performance, limited predominantly by the telescope design and atmospheric seeing conditions.
- Publication:
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Science with the VLT in the ELT Era
- Pub Date:
- 2009
- DOI:
- 10.1007/978-1-4020-9190-2_52
- Bibcode:
- 2009ASSP....9..315C
- Keywords:
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- Physics