11 June, 2015

The camera for the PAU (Physics of the Accelerating Universe) project succesfully saw first light at the prime focus of the William Herschel Telescope on the night June 3rd. PAUCam is an advanced imager comprising a mosaic of 18 state-of-the-art, fully-depleted, red-sensitive Hamamatsu CCDs, and a field of view with a diameter of about one degree (or about 14 times the sky area covered by the WHT's current prime-focus imager), of which 40 arcminutes are unvignetted. PAUCam was designed and built by a consortium of Spanish institutions (IFAE, ICE-CSIC/IEEC and PIC from Barcelona; CIEMAT and IFT-UAM/CSIC from Madrid).
PAUCam can be also used as a community instrument, to obtain the spectral-energy distributions of very large samples of objects, allowing the study of a variety of scientific topics. In addition to the existing set of narrow- and broad-band filters, it is also possible for users to mount their own special-purpose filters.

Image: (Left) PAUCam mounted on the William Herschel Telescope. (Right) First light images of M51 Galaxy.