Instrument Overview

While there is a recent NOAO newsletter article which further describes the instrument's installation, characteristics, and performance, a summary of the instrument's capabilities is presented below:

• ARCoIRIS is installed at the Blanco telescope f/8 Cassegrain focus on an instrument rotator
• The instrument is a single, fixed collimator-disperser-camera unit with no moving parts
• The science detector is a 2048×2048 Hawaii-2RG HgCdTe array with the following properties:
  • 18 micron square pixels with a sampling of 0.417"/pixel
  • gain of 1.1e-/ADU
  • linear to 5% up to 90000e-
  • readnoise for Double Correlated sampling is ~14e-/pixel
  • readnoise fir Fowler16 sampling is ~4.5e-/pixel
  • minimum exposure time of 1.2 seconds
  • readout time for Fowler1 sampling is ~2 seconds
• Fixed-format slit assembly is 1.1" wide and 28" long with offset 1.1" square-pitch outriggers
• Spectral reolution of R~3500 across the six science orders
• Imaging detector serves as a J-band slit viewer and guider with the following properties
  • 4' 4' field-of-view
  • ~0.264"/pixel plate scale
  • 0.75 second minimum exposure time
  • ~1 second readout time