Instrumentation development at the W.M. Keck Observatory

The W.M. Keck Observatory is now in its 12th year of science operations, and the development of new instruments, and upgrades to existing ones, continues to be an important part of our science driven strategic plan, which emphasizes state of the art instrumentation, continued advances in high angular resolution astronomy and faint-object spectroscopy. Our program is starting to deliver the third generation of instruments. The first of these, OSIRIS, was delivered in February 2005 and is now in shared risk operation. OSIRIS is the second instrument at the Observatory to be routinely used with laser guide star adaptive optics (LGS AO) on the Keck II telescope. LGS AO is now a regularly offered observing mode with a steadily increasing number of nights being made available to our community. AO developments underway at the Observatory include new wavefront controllers for the Keck I and Keck II AO systems, and the development of a solid state laser for the Keck I telescope (in collaboration with the Gemini Observatory). The development of Keck-Keck interferometry continues, with the V2 capability offered for routine observing and the Nuller in the commissioning process. Other developments include our next third generation instrument, a near-IR multi-object spectrograph (MOSFIRE), and a detector upgrade for the red channel of the LRIS instrument. Our atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) for the Cassegrain focus of the Keck I telescope is nearing completion, and the detector upgrade for the HIRES spectrograph has been in routine operation for over a year. We are also developing a new acquisition, guiding and image quality monitoring system to replace all of the visible wavelength instrument guiders and acquisition cameras at the Observatory.