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New Infrared Camera Gets Amazing Orion Images

Posted by timothy on from the spaceporn dept.

The BBC is reporting, as is the Register, about the new Wide-Field Camera (WFCAM) on the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii. WFCAM is the world's most powerful astronomical infrared camera. It's 5.4 meters long and weighs 1500 kilograms. As part of its commissioning, it produced some stunning images of interstellar clouds in Orion.

2 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Of all the photos , the one I liked by Gopal.V · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's an infra red telescope and all that... it can see a lot of stuff in space BUT the photo I really loved was this Down to Earth Night shot of the telescope itself....

    --
    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
  2. Some techy trivial by phirst · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Disclaimer: I'm the instrument scientist for WFCAM.

    We did actually submit the story to slashdot, thinging they might want to scoop the BBC and The Register for a change. Got rejected, but anyway. I thought Slashdot types might be interested in some of the techy background to the instrument:

    WFCAM generates about 200GB of data per night. The data is handled (recorded then processed) by a cluster of 8 PCs (Ahem, why yes, they do run Linux), each of which has a ~650GB RAID array.

    An interesting point to note is that in total, the WFCAM system contains a total of about 60 hard disks. No commercial hard disk is rated for use above 10,000 feet, and UKIRT is at almost 14,000. Hard disks rely on atmospheric air pressure to keep the heads seperated from the disk surface, so we've even found keeping the RAIDs running had at times presented quite a challenge.

    Also, of course the PCs are fan cooled. Fan cooling doesn't work too well when there's only 60% of the air they're used to (atmospheric pressure on the summit of Mauna Kea is about 60% that at sea level), and with the combination of 2.8GHz Xeons and half a dozen disks in each 3U rackmount machine, we had to fairly seriosuly beef up the case fans to keep the machines at a sane temperature.