The Wide field Infrared Camera (WIRCam) is one of the 3 workhorse instruments in operation at CFHT. It's mosaic of four HAWAII-2RG is read using two SDSU-III controllers with 32-amplifiers in parallel per detector. First-light images showed that WIRCam suffered from three flavors of cross-talk: the "positive", "negative" and "edge" cross-talks. All have now been eliminated at the source and WIRCam is now cross-talk free. Two of these cross-talks originated from the controller electronic and one, the "edge" cross-talk, is intimately linked to the HAWAII-2RG detector and its description may be of a broader interest for other instruments using these detectors. We present the three cross-talk flavors and the hardware or software solutions implemented to eliminate them.

Date Published: 9 July 2008
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 7014, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy II, 70142K (9 July 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.787670

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7014:
Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy II
Ian S. McLean; Mark M. Casali, Editor(s)