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Ovidiu Vaduvescu
WFC Instrument Specialist
ovidiuv@ing.iac.es

Wide Field Camera

WFC at INT Prime focus

The Wide Field Camera (WFC) is an optical mosaic camera for use at the prime focus of the 2.5m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT).

The WFC consists of 4 thinned EEV 2kx4k CCDs. The CCDs have a pixel size of 13.5 microns corresponding to 0.33 arcsec/pixel. The edge to edge limit of the mosaic, neglecting the ~1 arcmin inter-chip spacing, is 34.2 arcmins. The cycle time for the whole mosaic is around 42 seconds. A maximum of 6 filters could be installed in the wheel. Both broadband and Stromgren filter sets are available, as well as a range of narrowband filters.

IMPORTANT: in case a long run is going to be covered by several observers, please let us know well in advance so that student support can be scheduled each time a new team goes up.

IMPORTANT (since 5 Nov 2015): Please read carefully the info about filling the WFC cryostat.

News:

August 2013: Significant ellipticity of images in WFC data observed during the last months has been traced to bad tracking due to an irregularity in a specific drive gear (namely the worm driving the INT hour angle wheel). This has been addressed via a periodic correction in the telescope-control software released on 1st Aug 2013, and on-sky tests and independent data taken after this date show a considerable improvement in the INT image quality. WFC tracked images exposed as long as 2-3 minutes, as well as longer exposed guided images taken in very good natural seeing 0.5" now have FWHM=0.8-0.9" in the WFC, and star ellipticities give e < 0.1.

September 2012: Two new narrow band filters arrived (NOVA782HA and NOVA804HA), being offered by the Netherland Reasearch School for Astronomy (NOVA) which provided the funding (PI: David Sobral).

August 2010: On a shared-risk basis, binning is supported for all chips and windowing and/or binning are supported for chip 4 only (more info here).



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Contact:  (WFC Instrument Specialist)
Last modified: 07 December 2023