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CTIO Instrumentation News (1Sep94)
(from CTIO, NOAO Newsletter No. 39, 1 September 1994)

This quarter has been notable for the amount of progress in areas of
collaboration between the La Serena and Tucson instrumentation groups.
Additional work in ETS over the past quarter has been concentrated on
finishing the IR Imager for an engineering run scheduled in August, finishing
the construction of the components and software for the 4-m Active Primary
Support system, and continuing work on Arcon production and CCD
implementation.

o The CTIO IR Spectrometer came back from Tucson where it was reincarnated
with a new 256 X 256 InSb detector system operating with WILDFIRE. This was a
joint KPNO/CTIO effort with the participation of Jerry Heim and Nick Buchholz
of the Tucson IR group and Richard Elston and Manuel Lazo of CTIO. The
instrument met its deadline set by the encounter of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
with Jupiter and saw continuous use on the 1.5-m telescope during the event.
Another article in this section describes the refurbished instrument in some
detail.

o The new CTIO IR Imager (256 X 256] Rockwell NICMOS HgCdTe) is scheduled to
begin visitor use during September. Jerry Heim and Nick Buchholz helped us
bring up that detector system under WILDFIRE during their visit for the
installation of the IRS. If all goes well, we will by then be in a position
once again to offer IR imaging (0.9-2.5 um) and spectroscopy (0.9-5.0 um)
with our own instrumentation and we will gratefully return OSIRIS to its
creators at Ohio State.

o Diana Kennedy of the Mountain Programming Group in Tucson visited the Arcon
software group for a couple of weeks to plan her project to interface Arcons
to the WIYN telescope control system and instruments.

Two important CCD chips have received attention during this period. A new
Tek2048 (#4) of excellent quality has been put into use on an Arcon
controller. (See the accompanying article.) Also, the thinned Loral 3K X 1K
is entering the late stages of implementation on the Blue-optimized Air
Schmidt Camera.

Brooke Gregory

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