WHT - FAST Infra-red Imaging Fabry-Perot Camera
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William Herschel Telescope

FAST Infra-red Imaging Fabry-Perot Camera


First light: July 1991

De-commissioned:

Designed and built by: Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestriche Physik, Garching

Description: FAST is the Max-Planck-Institut fur Extraterrestriche Physik (MPE) Fabry-Perot array high-resolution spectrometer. It was designed by the group of Professor Reinhard Genzel, and is used specially to study near-infrared emission-line sources (around 2 microns)in Galactic and extragalactic objects. FAST is at the Cassegrain focus of the WHT.

The spectrometer consists of a 62×58 pixel InSb array from Santa Barbara Research Corporation. It is operated at only 6K. This gives FAST a typical dark current of about 50e- per second and a readout noise below 280 e-.

Some scientific highlights:

More information: R Clegg et al., 1991, "FAST on the WHT", Gemini Newsletter, 34, 1.

More photos of this instrument: http://www.ing.iac.es/PR/archive/wht/instruments.html



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Last modified: 23 July 2015