Wide-Field Camera (WFC)

First light: May 1997

Last commissioning: 

Designed and built by: Royal Greenwich Observatory (United Kingdom), Kapteyn Sterrenwacht Werkgroep (Holland) and the Lawerence Berkeley Laboratories (California).

Description: The WFC is based on a mosaic of four thinned 2048 × 2048 pixel Loral CCDs. These detectors were replaced by EEV CCDs in April 1998.

Some scientific highlights:

• The faintest Kuiper-Belt objects (1998)
• A new Local Group galaxy: The Cetus Dwarf Galaxy (1999)
• Comet Linear blows up in full view of the JKT (2000)
• A search for planetary nebuale in M33 (2000)
• A new Local Group galaxy (2001)
• A giant stream of metal-rich stars in the halo of the galaxy M31 (2001)
• Completely dark galaxies (2001)
• Tidal streams in the galactic halo (2001)
• One ring to encompass them all (2003)
• The census of planetary nebulae in the Local Group (2003)
• The Largest Known Planetary Nebula on the Sky (2004)
• Rings in the Haloes of Planetary Nebulae (2004)
• First Detection of a Progenitor Star from a Normal Type II-P Supernova (2004)
• A Panoramic Deep View of the Stellar Halo of Andromeda Galaxy (2004)
• The Deep Impact Event at the ING Telescopes (2005)
• A Jet-Powered Bubble Formed in the Gas Around Black Hole Cygnus X-1 (2005)
• The Isaac Newton Telescope Photometric Hα Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (2005)
• The INT/WFC Survey of the Monoceros Ring: Accretion Origin or Galactic Anomaly? (2005)
• A New Population of Star Clusters in the Halo of M31 (2005)
• A Dark Hydrogen Cloud in the Virgo Cluster (2005)
• A Gaseous Metal Disk Around a White Dwarf (2006)
• A New Planetary Nebula Discovered by IPHAS (2006)
• Short Time-Scale Variability in the Faint Sky Variability Survey (2006)
• The Millennium Galaxy Catalogue (2006)
• Discovery of Ultracompact Dwarf Galaxies in the Virgo Cluster (2006)
• Kinematics of the Andromeda Galaxy (2006)
• The POINT-AGAPE Survey (2006)
• The YORP Effect Detected on Near-Earth Asteroid 2000 PH5 (2007)
• http://www.ing.iac.es/PR/SH/SH2007/holmes.html (2007)
• A Whirlpool in the Wake Left by a Dying Star (2007)
• The Most Detailed Image Ever Produced of the Rosette Nebula (2007)
• Brown Dwarfs and Isolated Planetary-Mass Objects Might Follow the Same Formation Process (2007)
• A Low-Mass Pre-Main-Sequence Eclipsing Binary System (2007)
• A Panorama of Andromeda and Triangulum Halos (2007)
• Eclipsing Binaries and Cepheids in the Andromeda Galaxy (2007)
• Discovery of the Most Massive Galaxy Lens (2007)
• Evidence for an Extrasolar Planet Around CM Drac from Binary Stellar Eclipse Timing (2008)
• The Galaxy Zoo and Hanny's Voorwerp (2008)
• The Universe Shines Twice as Bright (2008)
• The WINGS Survey (2008)