Colloquium - Jeff Cooke’s “The GTC Wide-Field Imager - providing much-needed capabilities now and in the future”

Event details Date: Tuesday, September 29, 2026 Time: 12:45 PM Location: Bryant Space Science Center Room 217 Type: Exhibits / Arts Tags: Seminar About this event Speaker: Jeff Cooke, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia Title: The GTC Wide-Field Imager - providing much-needed capabilities now and in the future Abstract: Wide-field optical imaging is fundamental to nearly every area of astronomy and astrophysics at all wavelengths, high-energy particles, and gravitational waves and wide-field imagers are the highest demand instruments on their respective telescopes. We have entered the era of ground- and space-based billion-dollar 'mega-facilities' in each of these areas that require deep, 8-10m-class wide-field optical imaging to help achieve their main science objectives. However, existing 8m-class wide-field imagers do not have several much-needed capabilities, and no such imagers are planned on Earth or in space for the next 2+ decades. Capabilities include very deep (m ~ 28-30) 3000A-10000A imaging, including UV/u-band, CMOS fast imaging, broad, medium, and narrow band imaging, low surface brightness capability, fast (~10s) filter change and fast (~10s) readout, rapid-response capability, and minutes-later spectroscopic capability using real-time data processing, source identification and a deployable secondary mirror. I will present the UV-sensitive optical wide-field imager for the GTC and discuss several of the many unique and leading-edge science cases that it will enable and why it will keep GTC a leader in the ELT and mega-facility era. 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM 217 Bryant Space Science Center Official event details: https://calendar.ufl.edu/clas_astronomy/event/58084-colloquium-jeff-cookes-the-gtc-wide-field-imager-provi