UKIRT.

With a primary mirror of 3.8m in diameter, UKIRT is the world's largest telescope dedicated solely to IR astronomy. It is owned by the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) and run by the Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC) based in Hilo, Hawaii.

Situated at an elevation of 4194m above sea level on the volcano Mauna Kea (lat: $+19^{\circ} 49' 32''$, long: $-155^{\circ} 28' 24''$) it can view declinations from $\approx +60^{\circ}$-$-40^{\circ}$.

The telescope has a classical Cassegrain setup with a secondary mirror of diameter 31.3cm. The secondary mirror is capable of image stabilisation of $<0.1$ arcseconds by means of a fast tilt-tip motion.

The UKIRT Fast Track Imager (UFTI, see Roche 2002) is a relatively new camera for wavelengths 1-2.5$\mu\$m. It saw its first light in September 1998 and commenced its first science programs in December of the same year.

It is a $1024 \times 1024$, HgCdTe, CCD detector with a an extremely fine pixel scale of 0.091 arcseconds. This yields a total field of view of $\approx 90$ arcseconds square.

Figure 2.6: Transmission profiles of the $JHK$ Mauna Kea Near Infrared filter set available at UKIRT. From Tokunaga et al. 2002.