Update: In February 2012, the instrument's large collimator lens was found to be cracked.  The repair is in progress, to return FLAMINGOS-2 to the sky as soon as possible for science use.  The latest details about the status of the instrument can be found in the Status and Availability page.

FLAMINGOS-2 is a Near-Infrared wide field imager and multi-object spectrometer for use on Gemini-South. It was constructed by the University of Florida Astronomy Department. FLAMINGOS-2 was first delivered to Gemini in July 2009, was refurbished by the Gemini engineering team, and returned to commissioning in December 2011. 

FLAMINGOS-2 will provide Near Infrared (0.95-2.4 micron) imaging capabilities over a 6'.1 diameter circular field, and multi-object NIR spectroscopy at resolutions R = 1200-3000 for objects within a 2'x6' quasi-rectangular field. In the future, FLAMINGOS-2 will work in conjunction with the facility multi-conjugate adaptive optics (GeMS) system to provide imaging and MOS spectroscopy of the 2' MCAO corrected field. A further upgrade to install a dual-etalon tunable filter system has been proposed but is not scheduled yet.

For guiding, FLAMINGOS-2 has an on-instrument wavefront sensor (OIWFS) to provide guiding information to the telescope by measuring a nearby star. The OIWFS contains a 80x80-pixel Marconi CCD sensitive from 0.3 to 0.85 microns.

The following are examples of the type of observations carried out so far during the commissioning runs in December 2011 and January 2012.

This is a false color image of NGC 2442 produced by combining J (200 sec), H (475 sec), and Ks (200 sec) band images. The observations were made in December 2011 with median seeing of 0.6 arcsec in Ks.

This is an example of a long slit spectrum (1200 sec on source with the R3000 grism and K band filter) of NGC 1808.

This is an example of a raw (left) and sky-subtracted (right) MOS spectra obtained for 47Tuc (600 sec on source). The spectra were obtained with the R3K grism and the Ks filter.

The current web pages present an overview of FLAMINGOS-2's expected capabilities in order to support long-range planning in the observing community. Further information is continously being added to these pages.

The Instrument Scientist for FLAMINGOS-2 is Percy Gomez.