The Dark Energy Camera is a new imager with a 2°. 2 diameter field of view mounted at the prime focus of the Victor M. Blanco 4m telescope on Cerro Tololo near La Serena, Chile. The camera was designed and constructed by the Dark Energy Survey Collaborationand meets or exceeds the stringent requirements designed for the widefield and supernova surveys for which the collaboration uses it. The camera consists of a five-element optical corrector, seven filters, a shutter with a 60 cm aperture, and a charge-coupled device (CCD) focal plane of 250 μm thick fully depleted CCDs cooled inside a vacuum Dewar. The 570 megapixel focal plane comprises 62 2k × 4k CCDs for imaging and 12 2k × 2k CCDs for guiding and focus. The CCDs have 15 μm × 15 μm pixels with a plate scale of 0 263 pixel −1. A hexapod system provides state-of-the-art focus and alignment capability. The camera is read out in 20 s with 6-9 electronreadout noise. This paper provides a technical description of the cameraʼs engineering, construction, installation, and current status.

The Echellette Spectrograph and Imager (ESI) is a multipurpose instrument which has been delivered by the Instrument Development Laboratory of Lick Observatory for use at the Cassegrain focus of the Keck II telescope. ESI saw first light on August 29, 1999. ESI is a multi-mode instrument that enables the observer to seamlessly switch between three modes during an observation. The three modes of ESI are: An R=13,000-echellette mode; Low-dispersion prismatic mode; Direct imaging mode. ESI contains a unique flexure compensation system which reduces the small instrument flexure to negligible proportions. Long-exposure images on the sky show FWHM spot diameters of 34 microns (0. ′′ 34) averaged over the entire field of view. These are the best non-AO images taken in the visible at Keck Observatory to date. Maximum efficiencies are measured to be 28% for the echellette mode and greater than 41% for low-dispersion prismatic mode including atmospheric, telescope and detector losses. In this paper we describe the instrument and its development. We also discuss the performance-testing and some observational results.

The Inamori-Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph (IMACS) is a wide-field, multipurpose imaging spectrograph on the Magellan-Baade telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. IMACS has two channelsf/2 and f/4, each with an 8K × 8K pixel mosaic of CCD detectors, that service the widest range of capabilities of any major spectrograph. These include wide-field imaging at two scales, 0:20″ pixel À1 and 0:11″ pixel À1 , singleobject and multislit spectroscopy, integral-field spectroscopy with two 5″ × 7″ areas sampled at 0:20″ pixel À1 (Durham IFU), a multiobject echelle (MOE) capable of N ∼ 10 simultaneous full-wavelength R ≈ 20; 000 spectra, the Maryland-Magellan Tunable Filter (MMTF), and an image-slicing reformatter for dense-pack multislit work (GISMO). Spectral resolutions of 8 < R < 5000 are available through a combination of prisms, grisms, and gratings, and most modes are instantly available in any given IMACS configuration. IMACS has a spectroscopic efficiency over 50% in f/2 multislit mode (instrument only) and, by the AΩ figure of merit (telescope primary surface area times instrument field of view ), IMACS scores 5:7 m 2 deg 2 , compared with 3.1 for VIMOS on VLT3 and with 2.0 for DEIMOS on Keck2. IMACS is the most versatile, and-for wide-field optical spectroscopy-the most powerful spectrograph on the planet.

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We describe the design, construction, and commissioning of FIRE, a 0.82-2.51 μm echelle spectrograph for the 6.5 m Magellan Baade telescope. FIRE may be operated in two modes. Its primary mode is a prism cross-dispersed echelle, which delivers R ¼ 6000 spectra for an 0.6″ slit, with continuous wavelength coverage over the full instrument bandpass in a single setup. Alternatively, the echelle grating may be replaced with a flat mirror to obtain high-throughput R ¼ 400 longslit spectra through the prisms alone-again with full Y =J=H=K coverage. This contribution outlines the details of the optical design and execution, mechanical and thermal design, detector systems, and data analysis software. We also present performance metrics from commissioning observations. These have established that the instrument is achieving its design goals, particularly with regard to throughput, as is required for observations of faint, high-redshift QSOs and the lowest mass brown dwarfs.

Bigelow & Dressler 1 reported on the design and construction of IMACS -the Inamori-Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph. IMACS was installed on the Magellan-Baade 6.5-m telescope at the Carnegie Institution's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile in August, 2003, and was phased into regular operation in the remaining months of that year (Osip et al 2 ). IMACS is now the most-used instrument on the Baade telescope, accounting for 63% of the nights available for astronomy in the 2005 observing year.IMACS has two basic operating modes. A single 6-inch beam refractive collimator feeds either (1) an f/4 all-spherical refractive camera delivering 0.11 arcsec/pixel, or (2) a double-asphere refractive camera with oil-coupled multiplets producing a scale of 0.20 arcsec/pixel. The detector for both foci is an 8K x 8K mosaic camera of 8 SITe 2K x 4K 15µ CCDs. The collimator and f/4 camera have performed to design specifications and have delivered 0.45 arcsec images across the 15 arcmin square field. The f/2 camera has delivered images of 0.55 to 0.65 arcsec across its 27 arcmin diameter field in excellent seeing (FWHM ~ 0.40 arcsec). The f/4 camera uses 6-inch reflecting gratings to obtain spectroscopy at multiple resolutions ranging from R=1350-9375; the f/2 camera uses three 6-inch grisms to achieve resolutions of R=450, 600, and 900 over its larger field. We routinely cut hundreds of slits in 30-inch diameter stainless steel, spherical-shell slitmasks with a commercial laser system. Alignment procedures for observing are simple and efficient, typically requiring 5-10 minutes per set-up.

The Magellan Echellette (MagE) spectrograph is a single-object optical echellette spectrograph for the Magellan Clay telescope. MagE has been designed to have high throughput in the blue; the peak throughput is 22% at 5600 Å including the telescope. The wavelength coverage includes the entire optical window (3100 Å -1 µm). The spectral resolution for a 1" slit is R~4100. MagE is a very simple spectrograph with only four moving parts, prism cross-dispersion, and a vacuum Schmidt camera. The instrument saw first light in November 2007 and is now routinely taking science observations.

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is a 25.4-m diameter, optical/infrared telescope that is being built by an international consortium of universities and research institutions as one of the next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes. The primary mirror of GMT consists of seven 8.4 m borosilicate honeycomb mirror segments that are optically conjugate to seven corresponding segments in the Gregorian secondary mirror. Fabrication is complete for one primary mirror segment and is underway for the next two. The final focal ratio of the telescope is f/8.2, so that the focal plane has an image scale of 1.0 arcsec/mm. GMT will be commissioned using a fast-steering secondary mirror assembly comprised of conventional, rigid segments to provide seeing-limited observations. A secondary mirror with fully adaptive segments will be used in standard operation to additionally enable ground-layer and diffraction-limited adaptive optics. In the seeing limited mode, GMT will provide a 10 arcmin field of view without field correction. A 20 arcmin field of view will be obtained using a wide-field corrector and atmospheric dispersion compensator. The project has recently completed a series of sub-system and system-level preliminary design reviews and is currently preparing to move into the construction phase. This paper summarizes the technical development of the GMT sub-systems and the current status of the GMT project.