Top End

Andy Adamson

Head of Operations/Director of Science, UKIRT, Joint Astronomy Centre, Hilo, Hawaii

The second semester of UFTI operations is behind us. Commissioning and shared-risks operation has been an experience, at some times frustrating and at others exhilarating; after some difficult times in early 1999, the camera is now routinely producing data of the quality we were expecting. In terms of area coverage and sensitivity, it is extremely competitive with other infrared imagers on Mauna Kea, irrespective of telescope aperture. Image quality has been aided by the installation of the new secondary mirror. The six-pointed point-spread function produced by thermal distortion in the old secondary is a thing of the past: UKIRT images are now circular even on nights of 0.3 arcsecond seeing..

As detailed in the "People" section, this Newsletter coincides with significant changes of personnel at UKIRT. Polarimetry guru Antonio Chrysostomou has returned to the University of Hertfordshire (via a holiday in Maui!). Yaguang Yang has reunited his family after six months of separation, by taking up a post in Maryland, and Stuart Ryder (TSS/PDRA) will be leaving UKIRT in October, to the benefit of the AAO. He will be taking some UKIRT data with him, since he will be observing on the telescope early in October. We wish all three well in their new positions. Finally, Chris Davis took up a position as support astronomer, taking on the duties carried out by Antonio: supporting UKIRT polarimetry, and editing the Newsletter (of which this is his first). Not to spare his blushes, his approach to getting copy from UKIRT staff and external article writers has been firm and highly effective.

Two of the articles in this Newsletter highlight some of the science now coming from UFTI. The research paper based on UFTI data (Smail et al.) emerged into press recently, and favourable comments from observers on the instrument's performance give us confidence that UFTI will be the source of many high-quality publications over the next few years. The next major development will be the introduction of ORAC to control both UFTI and UKIRT. Currently scheduled for October, this will give observers a foretaste of the way UKIRT observational programmes will be prepared and executed with future common-user instruments.

The next major instrumental development will shortly be completed, with the introduction of TUFTI (the high-resolution thermal imager). This instrument, a modification of IRCAM3, will have internal cold optics and a pixel scale almost exactly the same as that of UFTI; this combination will result in low thermal background and good image sampling in the thermal infrared (3-5mm).

Since the last newsletter, our hopes that Michelle might be in Hawaii by the end of 1999 have been set back; we are now anticipating the instrument in the spring of 2000, and do not anticipate any shared-risks observations to commence until late summer. However, if there is a limit to how long the anticipation of a great instrument remains a source of excitement, we have not yet reached that limit, and look forward to providing the UKIRT community with versatile long-slit thermal spectroscopy, and excellent thermal surface-brightness sensitivity in both imaging and spectroscopy. In the longer, post-commissioning, term MICHELLE will spend half its time on UKIRT and half its time on Gemini.