United Kingdom Infrared Telescope

The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope ( UKIRT ) is a specialized on observations in the infrared astronomical telescope with 3.8 m primary mirror diameter at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.

UKIRT is the property of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and is operated by the Joint Astronomy Centre 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 detector technology then available in the infrared put fewer demands on the imaging quality than optical telescopes, so that, for example, the main mirror was designed thin and light. Since then it has been adapted by various retrofitting measures the current requirements and provides a typical image quality under a second of arc in the near infrared. UKIRT is still the world's largest fully specialized in infrared telescope observations, even if it is now surpassed in many features of optical- infrared telescopes of the 8 -meter class as the Very Large Telescope.

Instruments

The instrumentation of the UKIRT has been modernized since its commissioning in many cases. 2008, consisted of three instruments for the Cassegrain focus and a camera with a large field in front of the Cassegrain focus.

  • CGS4 is a cooled grating spectrometer with 90 seconds of arc gap length and spectral resolution 1000-30000.
  • Ufti is a 1024x1024 pixel camera for wavelengths between 0.8 and 2.5 microns.
  • UIST is a 1024x1024 pixel camera with spectrometer for wavelengths from 0.8 to 5 microns, with additional feldabbildendem mode for a box of 3x6 arcsec.
  • WFCAM is a camera with a large field with four 2048x2048 pixel chips each covering a field of about 13.6 arc minutes on a side, together or about 0.2 square degrees.

Current operating

Since the commissioning of WFCAM in 2004, the most important project on UKIRT is the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey Sky Survey ( UKIDSS ), which claimed about 80 % of the available WFCAM with the wide-field mode time. WFCAM uses about 60% of the telescope time, the remaining 40 % being used observations with the Cassegraininstrumenten. Any amendment or limitation of the operation from 2009 is under discussion.

Mauna Kea Observatories Science & Technology Facilities Council Minute of arc#Symbols and abbreviations
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