Mini-mosaic imager on-line at WIYN

An image of the globular cluster M3, NGC5272, obtained with the mini-mosaic camera (described in an NOAO newsletter article) on a Nasmyth focus of the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope on Kitt Peak. The camera uses two 2k x 4k SITE CCDs, mounted side by side to create a 4k x 4k field of view. The gap through the middle of the image shows the separation of the chips. In this configuration, the pixel size is 0.14 arc seconds on the sky, and the field of view is 9.6 arc minutes square. It is a 120 second exposure in the B passband, and images have full width at half maximum (FWHM) of better than 0.5 arc seconds. Note the even image quality all the way to the corners, and how the inset shows that even this seeing is very well sampled. The instrument thus exploits the superb seeing obtained by the WIYN telescope, while also delivering images with moderately large field of view over which the image quality is uniform.