Maisie F. Rashman,1,2 Iain A. Steele,2 Stuart D. Bates,2 Johan H. Knapen,3,4 David Copley2
1Univ. of California, Davis (United States) 2Liverpool John Moores Univ. (United Kingdom) 3Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Spain) 4Univ. de La Laguna (Spain)
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Mid-infrared observations are a vital tool for the study of a wide range of astrophysical phenomena. However, ground-based mid-infrared detectors must overcome the challenge of the overwhelming thermal background from sky and telescope emissions making them prohibitively costly for smaller (< 3 m) facilities. We describe the design and testing of a simple prototype, low-cost 10 µm imaging instrument built around an uncooled microbolometer camera. The instrument incorporates adjustable germanium re-imaging optics to rescale the image to an appropriate plate-scale for 1−2 m class telescopes and uses a gold coated chopping mirror to remove overwhelming sky background contributions. The instrument was tested with a programme of observations of bright mid-infrared sources on the 2 m Liverpool Telescope and the 1.52 m Carlos Sanchez Telescope. With these observations we confirm the instrument can be used for diffraction-limited imaging and has a photometric stability of ~10 %. We report an in-practice sensitivity limit of ~600 Jy, and a theoretical sensitivity limit of ∼ 450 Jy based on the noise equivalent differential temperature of the microbolometer system.
Maisie F. Rashman,Iain A. Steele,Stuart D. Bates,Johan H. Knapen, andDavid Copley
"Microbolometer arrays for ground-based infrared imaging", Proc. SPIE 11447, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VIII, 1144796 (13 December 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2559465
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Maisie F. Rashman, Iain A. Steele, Stuart D. Bates, Johan H. Knapen, David Copley, "Microbolometer arrays for ground-based infrared imaging," Proc. SPIE 11447, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VIII, 1144796 (13 December 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2559465