NIC-FPS - Current Status, History, Offsite Information, and Reference
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This page last updated: June 28, 2006 - JMD
This page last checked: October 27, 2004 - JMD
Contents
Current Status
History
Offsite Information
Reference
Current Status
NIC-FPS is currently available with a shared risk useage. NIC-FPS will be taken offline during the summer 2005 for maintenance.
21 November 2004 - Images
Ceph A - Kband etalon
Saturn FeII - 164um
Saturn H2 - 212um
Saturn SiVI - 196um
Saturn Color - version 1
Saturn Color - version 2
23 September 2004 - Telescope First Light!
 
On the night of 23 September, NIC-FPS was tested on the 3.5m telescope for the first time. Observations were made during twilight on time graciously donated by Don York (UChicago) for initial focus tests. Using the SPIcam instrument block -- and assuming no other knowledge of the optical alignment of the instrument -- the team landed Vega near the center of the chip on first attempt. The image above (left) shows a magnitude 10.7 star imaged in the narrowband H2 filer at 2.122 microns; the adjacent plot shows profile fits to the image. The star image has a FWHM of approximately 3 pixels, corresponding to 0.81 arcseconds given the anticipated plate scale.
NIC-FPS Installed on the ARC 3.5m Telescope
"First" Light - This was our first attempt at pointing the Telescope/Instrument at the star Vega.
Pretty good!!!
History
30 July 2004
 Lab First Light!
Assembly of the instrument is largely complete now, and lab testing has begun. On Friday, July 30th, after a successful cooldown of the integrated optic bench inside the dewar housing, light was sent through the NIC-FPS optical path for the first time. Using a 50-micron pinhole and an incandescent lamp as a light source, a circularly-symmetric spot of approximately the expected size was imaged onto the H1RG detector. The cutout at left is a detail from a full-chip image of the spot.
Delivery of the new instrument to APO is anticipated in mid-late September, with on-sky commissioning to begin in October. Full availability of NIC-FPS to the ARC user community will follow in the first quarter of 2005.
June 2004 - NIC-FPS at SPIE
The design of the new instrument was presented in a paper by Hearty et al. at the SPIE conference "Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation", held in Glasgow, Scotland, 21-25 June 2004. A PDF version of the paper is available.
26 May 2004 - Detector First Light!
 Detector First Light!
The image above shows the image of the hot filament from a floodlamp through a pinhole in front of the dewar window. It represents the "detector first light" on our Rockwell Hawaii 1RG detector, soon to be the first H1RG chip deployed for routine scientific use in groundbased astronomy in the world.
21 May 2004
The front housing of NIC-FPS is fit-tested on the 3.5m telescope at APO
CU grad student Fred Hearty and undergrad Rob Valentine visited the site on Friday, May 21, bringing with them the front housing and 3.5m mounting plate for NIC-FPS. The combination was fit-tested on the NA2 rotator and adjustments were made to the suspension system to make the housing back plate more closely perpendicular to the optical axis of the telescope. This in turn will align the axis of the optical bench of the instrument, which is cantilevered off the front housing, with the telescope, resulting in fewer adjustments required later.
NIC-FPS is an instrument combining the capabilities of a near-infrared imaging camera with a cryogenic Fabry-Perot etalon currently under development at the Center for Space Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, University of Colorado with support from Rice University, Ball Aerospace and the Astrophysical Research Consortium. It is scheduled to begin operations on the ARC 3.5m telescope at Apache Point Observatory in 2004.
NIC-FPS will allow narrowband near-IR imaging and medium (R~10,000) resolution spectrometry of a variety of astrophysical objects with a 4.6'x4.6' FOV. It will be among the first ground-based instruments to implement the Rockwell Hawaii-1RG detector, which gives high quantum efficiency (>65%) over the instrument's wavelength sensitivity range of 0.85-2.5 microns. The Queensgate Instruments QI EC50WF etalon, provided by Rice University, will enable 0.01% bandpass full-field imaging aorund a number of interesting atomic and molecular lines, resulting in excellent sky background suppression. Examples of applications of this capability include full-field kinematic mapping of star forming regions, tracing stellar outflows into regions of extreme extinction, examination of mass ejection in post-Main Sequence stars and the properties of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in emission.
Schematic view
Optical layout
Offsite Information
Project Links
NIC-FPS Official Website at the University of Colorado
Project Description (PDF)
Reference
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