TIFR Near Infrared Imaging Camera-II on the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope

TIFR Near Infrared Imaging Camera-II is a closed-cycle Helium cryo-cooled imaging camera equipped with a Raytheon 512 x 512 pixels InSb Aladdin III Quadrant focal plane array having sensitivity to photons in the 1-5 microns wavelength band. In this paper, we present the performance of the camera on...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2018-02
Main Authors: Baug, T, Ojha, D K, Ghosh, S K, Sharma, S, Pandey, A K, Kumar, Brijesh, Ghosh, Arpan, Ninan, J P, Naik, M B, D'Costa, S L A, Poojary, S S, Sandimani, P R, Shah, H, Reddy, B Krishna, Pandey, S B, Chand, H
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cameras
Field of view
Focal plane devices
Helium
Infrared cameras
Infrared imaging
Infrared telescopes
Parameter estimation
Photons
Pixels
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
Spaceborne telescopes
Telescopes
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer
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Summary:TIFR Near Infrared Imaging Camera-II is a closed-cycle Helium cryo-cooled imaging camera equipped with a Raytheon 512 x 512 pixels InSb Aladdin III Quadrant focal plane array having sensitivity to photons in the 1-5 microns wavelength band. In this paper, we present the performance of the camera on the newly installed 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT) based on the calibration observations carried out during 2017 May 11-14 and 2017 October 7-31. After the preliminary characterization, the camera has been released to the Indian and Belgian astronomical community for science observations since 2017 May. The camera offers a field-of-view of ~86.5 arcsec x 86.5 arcsec on the DOT with a pixel scale of 0.169 arcsec. The seeing at the telescope site in the near-infrared bands is typically sub-arcsecond with the best seeing of ~0.45 arcsec realized in the near-infrared K-band on 2017 October 16. The camera is found to be capable of deep observations in the J, H and K bands comparable to other 4-m class telescopes available world-wide. Another highlight of this camera is the observational capability for sources up to Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) W1-band (3.4 microns) magnitudes of 9.2 in the narrow L-band (nbL; lambda_{cen} ~3.59 microns). Hence, the camera could be a good complementary instrument to observe the bright nbL-band sources that are saturated in the Spitzer-Infrared Array Camera ([3.6]
ISSN:2331-8422