CanariCam: a multimode mid-infrared camera for the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS

Telesco, Charles M.; Ciardi, David; French, James; Ftaclas, Christ; Hanna, Kevin T.; Hon, David B.; Hough, James H.; Julian, Jeffrey; Julian, Roger; Kidger, Mark; Packham, Chris C.; Pina, Robert K.; Varosi, Frank; Sellar, R. Glenn
Bibliographical reference

Instrument Design and Performance for Optical/Infrared Ground-based Telescopes. Edited by Iye, Masanori; Moorwood, Alan F. M. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 4841, pp. 913-922 (2003).

Advertised on:
3
2003
Number of authors
14
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
55
Refereed citations
45
Description
The University of Florida is developing a mid-infrared camera for the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio CANARIAS. CanariCam has four science modes and two engineering modes, which use the same 320 x 240-pixel, arsenic-doped silicon, blocked-impurity-band detector from Raytheon. Each mode can be remotely selected quickly during an observing sequence. The pixel scale is 0.08 arcsec, resulting in Nyquist sampling of the diffraction-limited point-spread-function at 8 μm, the shortest wavelength for which CanariCam is optimized. The total available field of view for imaging is 26 arcsec x 19 arcsec. The primary science mode will be diffraction-limited imaging using one of several available spectral filters in the 10 μm (8-14 μm) and 20 μm (16-25 μm) atmospheric windows. Any one of four plane gratings can be inserted for low and moderate-resolution (R = 100 - 1300) slit spectroscopy in the 10 and 20-μm regions. Insertion of appropriate field and pupil stops converts the camera into a coronagraph, while insertion of an internal rotating half-wave plate, a field mask, and a Wollaston prism converts the camera into a dual-beam polarimeter.