THE UNITED KINGDOM INFRARED TELESCOPE
ANNUAL REPORT
1995 AND 1996

4. Report on Operations

4.4. Instruments

4.4.5. Visitor Instruments

Apart from SMIRFS (see above), all of the visitor instruments in use at UKIRT during 1995-1996 were 10-20m imagers. MIRAC, a 10-20m camera built in the United States, was used both by its builders and by U.K. scientists, according to an informal agreement approved by the UKIRT Programme Committee. Performance of this instrument was state-of-the-art, with diffraction-limited image quality achieved on UKIRT. Similar image quality was achieved for MIRAS, an Australian built 10-20m imager with polarimetric capabilities, which had one observing run in 1996, and for MAX, the 10-20um camera built by the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg and used frequently by MPIA staff at UKIRT as compensation for MPIA contributions to the Upgrades Programme. Each of the latter two instruments suffered from mechanical and cryogenic problems and excess noise in its initial observing runs. By 1996 the sensitivity of MAX had been improved to near state-of-the-art.