Development of a Flat Calibration Unit for TAO/MIMIZUKU

MIMIZUKU is a mid-infrared instrument for the TAO 6.5-m telescope under construction in the Atacama Desert, Chile, and will be the world's first mid-infrared monitoring observation station. We aim to achieve a photometric accuracy of 1%. For this purpose, highly accurate flat fielding with an accuracy of 0.1% is needed. Although flat fielding has been conducted using sky images and dark images conventionally, the correction has uncertainties of several percent. The reason is that the non-linearity of the detector is not considered. To improve this, it is necessary to create flat frames from data in the same count level as during observation. Highly accurate flat frames were derived by taking differential counts against the time variation of the atmospheric radiation. However, this method cannot be used under stable conditions suitable for observations. Therefore, we developed a flat calibration unit which irradiates the detector uniformly and vary the irradiation intensity with time to enable the improved flat fielding under any conditions. We designed the unit that irradiates the detector uniformly by placing a silicon lens and a blackbody source in front of the camera. The blackbody source is put at the pupil position of the optical system. We made some tests to create flat images with the unit. By improving flat fielding, we have successfully corrected for patterns originating from the detector, which appeared in the conventional one. We also clarified that the accuracy of the improved flat fielding was 0.29%, while the accuracy of the conventional one was 1.3%.