THE UNITED KINGDOM INFRARED TELESCOPE
ANNUAL REPORT 2003-2004

1. The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope

Situated at an altitude of 4194m above sea level on the southern summit ridge of Mauna Kea, the 3.8-metre UK Infrared Telescope has for 25 years been the world's largest dedicated infrared telescope. UKIRT is owned and operated by the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), through the Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC), Hilo, under the oversight of the UKIRT Board. UKIRT telescope time is awarded in peer-reviewed open competition to the world community by PPARC's Panel for Allocation of Telescope Time, apart from a 15% allocation to the University of Hawaii and, throughout the period of this report, allocations to the Japanese astronomical community in exchange for Japan's contribution to the WFCAM project (described below).

UKIRT's purpose is to support high-quality fundamental observational research in infrared astronomy. It does this by providing to its user community astronomical instrumentation maintained at the state-of-the-art through a vigorous programme of instrument development in the UK, by continually improving the performance and observational efficiency of its existing instruments and the telescope, by providing its users with a world-leading user software environment coupled with summit and remote support of the highest quality, and by identifying opportunities to enhance all of these systems.

This annual report covers two years, in which the instrumentation described in the previous report bedded in and the observatory switched its mode of operation to a more flexible method of scheduling observations at the summit. The latter development resulted in major improvements in the completion rate of the top ranked projects and considerable financial savings for the supporting agency. UKIRT users remained as ambitious as ever and the UIST spectrograph, in particular the integral field unit produced some unique results. In the second year reported here, UKIRT took delivery of the final instrument in the UKIRT development programme, the wide field imager WFCAM. This groundbreaking instrument gives UKIRT access to one-degree wide-field imaging with half-arcsecond resolution and extremely high sensitivity.

Finally, the telescope this year celebrated twenty five years of successful operations, in a joint function with the NASA IRTF, which also marked its quarter century this year.

The equivalent number of staff working at UKIRT in 2004 remained similar to previous years, at approximately 30.