Sigma QUick Infrared Camera guide

2	QUIRC User Guide

in cases where the background has been changing rapidly. It may also give better results if the dome ﬂat was not evenly illuminated (it is difﬁcult to achieve even illumination at the 0.6m telescope). The dark should be subtracted from the sky before division. The disadvantages of this technique are that the sky ﬂat shows the response of the detector to the OH airglow + thermal emission. In particular, fringing may be present in certain conﬁgurations (e.g. 2.2m f/10 1:1), and fringing is something which should be subtracted, not divided.

The number of bad pixels usually dictates a special technique for observing in which several exposures are made of the ﬁeld being studied, with each exposure shifted slightly from the others (dithering). When the images are combined, the bad pixels in one image can be “ﬁlled in" with good pixels from a shifted image. This technique also improves ﬂat-ﬁelding relative to a single long exposure at the same position.

It is recommended that at the start and end of each night dome ﬂats and darks be taken. The darks should ideally be exposures of the same length as the object exposures. Even if the darks are not directly used in the reduction, they will serve to show which pixels have high dark counts so that these pixels can be included in a bad pixel mask. Dome ﬂats are generally taken as a lights on/lights off pair. Using this strategy results in a difference image (ON – OFF) which represents the detector’s ﬂat-ﬁeld response to a source with color temperature of a few 1000 K, which is roughly the same temperature as some of the sources being studied.

The shutter is a leaf type shutter, meaning than the center part of the aperture is open slightly longer than the outside. Recent tests showed signiﬁcant center-to-edge illumination differences for integration times less than 1 second. Therefore, short exposures should be avoided, particularly when exposing dome ﬂats—it is far better to dim the lights with the domelight dimmer switch and use an exposure of a few seconds than to use the dome lights at full intensity and an exposure which is less than a second (this can introduce spurious radially varying structure into the ﬂat-ﬁeld). There is an uncertainty in the timing of the shutter of the order of 10 millisec. Therefore, short standard star exposures should also be avoided—on the 2.2m, the Elias standards may need to be slightly defocused to allow reasonable exposure times in the broad ﬁlters.

At the 2.2m telescope there is a slight rotation in the nominal cassegrain rotator position (270). The rotation was measured in February 1996 to be 0.883 degrees CCW (e.g., N is rotated 0.883 deg E of vertical when displayed in the normal way). One could attempt to adjust slightly for this by changing the rotator position, or adjust for it later during data reduction. If the precise rotation and scale is important to the observations, one must measure this carefully during the run since the exact rotation value is likely to change slightly between runs when the instrument is taken off the telescope and remounted.

2.1Detector Linearity, Saturation, Read Noise, Dark Current

Hard saturation of the detector occurs at 50,000 ADU’s. The total gain of the system results in a scale factor of 1.85 electrons/ADU. Recent tests (2/96) showed the device to be linear to better than 1% for values up to about 44,000 ADUs. However, the gain and illumination is variable across the array so care must be taken so that parts of the array are not saturating when the average ADU value is getting close to the non-linear region. The average value should be kept below 40,000 ADUs to ensure that one is not saturating areas of the array. The average detector dark current is 0.8 electrons/sec, and the read noise is 15 electrons rms.