Big Red Eye is Ready

VISTA Camera Shipped to Paranal

VISTA Camera Shipped to Paranal The 2.9-ton VISTA camera awaiting its shipment at the CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK Credit: VISTA

The 2.9-tonne VISTA camera has been designed and built by a consortium including the CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the UK Astronomy Technology Center (UK ATC) in Edinburgh and the University of Durham.

"The camera operates under vacuum at a temperature of -200 degrees Celsius, so in many ways it has been like designing an instrument for use in space, but with the additional constraint of having to survive an earthquake environment," said Kim Ward, the Camera Manager from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, who oversaw the technical challenges. "With a total of 67 million pixels, VISTA has a much larger number of infrared sensitive detectors than previous infrared instruments."

VISTA is due to start scientific operations in the last quarter of 2007. "VISTA will be able to take images of sky areas each about 3 times as large as the full Moon," said Jim Emerson of Queen Mary, University of London, UK and VISTA's Principal Investigator. "This means it can survey quickly. The camera is crucial to carrying out VISTA's surveys which will provide statistical samples of objects and at the same time locate and characterize rare and variable objects, and perhaps most tantalizingly make discoveries of the as-yet unknown."

The VLT and VISTA Aerial view of Paranal with VISTA in the foreground and the Very Large Telescope in the background Credit: Gerhard Hüdepohl, ESO

"VISTA is an eagerly awaited addition to ESO's suite of telescopes," commented Catherine Cesarsky, ESO's Director General. "Wide area surveys in the infrared such as those which VISTA will undertake can drive discoveries across the field of astronomy."

"The unique Paranal site, the large 4-m telescope aperture, the wide field, and the high efficiency of the detectors will make VISTA the world's outstanding ground based near-IR survey instrument," said Richard Wade from PPARC and President of the ESO Council.

VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) is a 55 million Euro project, funded by grants from the UK DTI's Joint Infrastructure Fund and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) to Queen Mary, University of London, the lead institute of the VISTA Consortium. VISTA forms part of the UK's subscription to ESO and will be an ESO telescope. VISTA is project managed by PPARC's UK Astronomy Technology Center. The VISTA web page is at http://www.vista.ac.uk.

Source / Credit: ESO