Proposed instrumentation for PILOT

• Main Authors: Will Saunders, Peter Gillingham, Andrew Mcgrath, Roger Haynes, John Storey, Jon Lawrence, Michael Burton, Charles Jenkins, Alcione Mora
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: instrumentation; Antarctica; wide-field; optical; infrared; tip-tilt; fast guiding; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.367.3294; http://www.aao.gov.au/instsci/spie2008/PSI70144N.pdf

PILOT (the Pathfinder for an International Large Optical Telescope) is a proposed Australian/European optical/infrared telescope for Dome C on the Antarctic Plateau, with target first light in 2012. The proposed telescope is 2.4m diameter, with overall focal ratio f/10, and a 1 degree field-of-view. In median seeing conditions, it delivers 0.3 " FWHM widefield image quality, from 0.7-2.5 microns. In the best quartile of conditions, it delivers diffraction-limited imaging down to 1 micron, or even less with lucky imaging. The areas where PILOT offers the greatest advantages over existing ground-based telescopes are (a) very high resolution optical imaging, (b) high resolution wide-field optical imaging, and (c) all wide-field thermal infrared imaging. The proposed first generation instrumentation consists of (a) a fast, lownoise camera for diffraction-limited optical lucky imaging; (b) a gigapixel optical camera for seeing-limited imaging over a 1 degree field; (c) a 4K x 4K near-infrared (1-5 micron) camera with both wide-field and diffraction-limited modes; and (d) a double-beamed mid-infrared (7-40 micron) imaging spectrograph.