The Australian-led Keck Wide-Field Imager: The most powerful wide-field camera in the world

A/Prof Jeff Cooke (Swinburne)
Deep, wide-field imaging is essential in nearly every area of astronomy and wide-field imagers are the highest demand instruments on their respective telescopes. The Australian-led Keck Wide-Field Imager (KWFI) is a 1-degree diameter field of view UV-sensitive optical camera for Keck telescopes, ideally complementing upcoming wide-field space missions, as well crucial for faint, rare, and high density targets and to optimise new spectroscopic instruments for 8m and 30m-class telescopes, in which Australia is invested. KWFI will be the most powerful wide-field camera in the world for the foreseeable future and the only such 8m-class camera sensitive from 10000A down to 3000A. KWFI can reach game-changing magnitudes of m ~ 28 - 30 (~25 - 4 nano-Jy) depths over wide fields, including the u-band, as a result of Keck’s 10m aperture and 4100m elevation. In this talk, I will discuss the KWFI instrument, its status, and the path forward. Australians will have access to KWFI and related programs to perform world-leading science that cannot be done on any other telescope, even 30-metre telescopes. Examples of KWFI science are many and include: mapping the Epoch of Reionisation to complement a main goal of the SKA by being the only wide-field instrument capable of detecting the ionising flux from high redshift galaxies; deep, wide-field galaxy lensing and large-scale structure research; accurate photometric redshifts down to the faint end of galaxy luminosity functions; faint and diffuse dwarf galaxies, Local group and Milky Way stellar population selection and low metallicity stars; solar system science; and all types of transients from low to high redshift. KWFI will be the only imager with the sensitivity to localise and discover the bulk of the kilonovae detected by current and future gravitational wave detectors. KWFI accesses 2/3rds of the Southern Hemisphere sky, as well as the full Northern Hemisphere sky, enabling Australians to lead the world in all these areas of science and more.