The f/5 Instrumentation Suite for the Clay Telescope

Szentgyorgyi, A.; McLeod, B.; Fabricant, D.; Fata, R.; Norton, T.; Ordway, M.; Roll, J.; Bergner, H.; Conroy, M.; Curley, D.; Epps, H.; Gauron, T.; Geary, J.; Mueller, M.; Uomoto, A.; Amato, S.; Barberis, J.; Eng, R.; Furesz, G.; Hertz, E.; Hull, C.; McCracken, K.; Nystrom, G.; Osip, D.; Palunas, P.; Perez, F.; Sanchez, F.; Suc, V.; Weaver, D.; Woods, D.; McLean, IS; Ramsay, SK; Takami, H
2012
GROUND-BASED AND AIRBORNE INSTRUMENTATION FOR ASTRONOMY IV
DOI
10.1117/12.925510
The f/5 instrumentation suite for the Clay telescope was developed to provide the Magellan Consortium observer community with wide field optical imaging and multislit NIR spectroscopy capability. The instrument suite consists of several major subsystems including two focal plane instruments. These instruments are Megacam and MMIRS. Megacam is a panoramic, square format CCD mosaic imager, 0.4 degrees on a side. It is instrumented with a full set of Sloan filters. MMIRS is a multislit NIR spectrograph that operates in Y through K band and has long slit and imaging capability as well. These two instruments can operate both at Magellan and the MMT. Megacam requires a wide field refractive corrector and a Topbox to support shutter and filter selection functions, as well as to perform wavefront sensing for primary mirror figure correction. Both the corrector and Topbox designs were modeled on previous designs for MMT, however features of the Magellan telescope required considerable revision of these designs. In this paper we discuss the optomechanical, electrical, software and structural design of these subsystems, as well as operational considerations that attended delivery of the instrument suite to first light.