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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