New Infrared Camera Gets Amazing Orion Images

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.

Comments

color codes

[global_diffusion]

Hey, check out these pics. The nice thing is that they labeled them with what the colors actually mean (instead of having people think that interstellar gas is normally green and purple, like in star trek).

Of all the photos , the one I liked

[Gopal.V]

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....

Re:Sherpa scientists?

[Shag]

13760? Bah, that's comfy. Slightly uphill from UKIRT is the University of Hawaii's 88-inch scope, which is sited at roughly 13770 feet with its dome floor around 13790+. There are others on Mauna Kea with higher dome floors (bigger facilities, more modern) but 88 is the highest-sited scope in the world that's regularly manned every week of the year (and often every day), by day crew for maintenance and/or night operators.

Yes, I work there. No, I don't use oxygen. Below about 15000 feet the TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) is "indefinite" which means some people can go hang out for 12-14 hours with nothing bad happening. There are some observatories up there that are talking about creating a single pressurized "break room" for staff - not where I work, though. :)

Oh, and the Rockwell HAWAII-2RG 2048x2048 sensors used to build UKIRT's WFCAM (it has 4 of them in a square array) were co-developed by U. of Hawaii, Rockwell Scientific and UMC, and first deployed in November of 2003 in the "ULB" camera on 88. For some time, 88 with ULB was the most powerful infrared setup for astrophotography; since UKIRT is the largest dedicated infrared scope in the world, it will now (with its own 16-megapixel camera) really take some great pictures. :) I was over at UKIRT for their 25th anniversary open house, and it's one BIG instrument.

...of course, Gemini South (8.1-meter) has ordered some HAWAII-2RG chips from Rockwell, I think... and the European folks are mumbling about doing a 4x4 array of them (64 megapixels) for their forthcoming VISTA telescope in Chile, which will be the bigger better successor to UKIRT.

Time to Die.

[rocketsled]

"I have seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I have seen C-beams glitter in the darkness at the Tannhauser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die."

Some techy trivial

[phirst]

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.