CAIN
CAIN
Location
Band
Owner institution
State
Description
CAIN-III is a powerful and versatile instrument designed and built by the IAC. Its detector is composed by a mosaic of 256 x 256 HgCdTe photovoltaic elements (NICMOS 3 technology), sensitive in the 1.0 – 2.5 µm, together with four bias electronic devices each of them controlling a quadrant and with an independent readout. Each pixel’s physical size is 40 µm, corresponding to scales in the focal plane of 1 arcsec/pixel and 0.39 arcsec/pixel for the ‘wide’ and ‘narrow’ field configurations, respectively. Therefore, the field of view for these two configurations is 4.2×4.2 arcmin (wide) and 1.7×1.7 arcmin (narrow). CAIN–III is the migration of the user’s software of the Infrared Camera to Linux (Fedora Core 6). This migration has involved changing the windowing system from Sun OpenWindows (OpenLook) for Motif (OpenMotif) and the data bus (former controller of San Diego) for a Linux-compatible bus (PCI bus). Cain-III maintains the same functionality as its predecessor, except for some enhancements.
Technical Data
IR Imaging
Range: 1µ to 2.5µ
NIR broad band: JHKs+ narrow
Wide Field Scale: 1.0″/px – FoV: 4.3’x4.3'
Narrow Field Scale: 0.39″/px – FoV: 1.7’x1.7′
History
CAIN–III now has a new detector, with better instrumental response and linearity. It consists of a mosaic of photoelectric elements 256 x 256 HgCdTe (NICMOS technology 3), sensitive in the 1-2.5 micron range, with four electronic bias and independent reading, each controlling a quadrant. The following Figure below shows a flat–field image taken with the new detector, which was installed in June 2008. The resulting mask is shown at the right. A total of 3127 bad pixels are located. This accounts for 4.77% of the CAIN detector.
