RE: VISTA?

["Jim Emerson" <j.p.emerson@qmul.ac.uk>]

Cher Christian,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: veillet@cfht.hawaii.edu [mailto:veillet@cfht.hawaii.edu]
> Sent: 09 October 2001 04:24
> To: j.p.emerson@qmw.ac.uk
> Cc: Christian Veillet
> Subject: VISTA?
>
> Bonjour Jim,
>
> Sorry to bother you again. The CFH Legacy Survey proposal will
> be out to the communities next week. I am refining a few things
> and would appreciate any news you would have on VISTA. As you
> know, I have a hard time getting some reasonable time line
> for the project.

I am sorry I did not reply before but we are currently near the end of our
Phase A of detailed conceptual design and I have been discussing the issue
of VISTA time line with the VISTA Consortium. Decisions have only just been
made.

> It could be that VISTA become operational
> just when we are done with our CFHLS. Our small wide field
> IR camera will have done a very small fraction of the IR follow
> up (it will come on the sky in ~2004 and will have a field 1/10th
> of our visible camera...). VISTA would be in a very nice position
> to make the IR follow up of the southern fields of the CFHLS.
> All the raw and pre-processed images of the CFHLS will be public
> one year after their acquisition. No special prop. time for the
> CFHLS data!

> Could VISTA be ready with the IR camera right away?

At the moment we plan to be ready first with the IR camera (16 2kx2k chips
with 0.31' pixels) -- in early 2006.

> Are you still planning to start with an optical camera?

No -- the projected budget tells us that the optical camera will have to
come later. How much later is unclear as it is tied up in attempts to close
out the specification-schedule-budget loop. It is likely to remain unclear
until we have placed sufficient contracts to give us a real handle on the
true costs. I fear that we will need to eventually seek additional funds to
allow us to make the optical camera at all!! However the VISTA Consortium
remains committed to getting an optical camera on VISTA eventually, even if
its available funds don't currently permit it to do so.

> Any comments/ideas you are ready to share would be more than
> welcome.

>From the CFHLS perspective VISTA could make the follow up from 2006. Of
course WFCAM should be able to do so earlier. Naturally pending the
acquisition of VISTA's own optical camera (and in any event) much of the
science will strongly benefit from such matching optical and IR data sets.

Jim

==============================
Jim Emerson (Principal Investigator VISTA http://www.vista.ac.uk)
Email:      j.p.emerson@qmul.ac.uk
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