Hubble Space Telescope Primer for Cycle 11

B.5 Wide Field and Planetary Camera 1 (WF/PC)

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The WF/PC had two configurations; in both, the FOV was covered by a mosaic of four charge-coupled devices (CCDs). Each CCD had 800 × 800 pixels and was sensitive from 1150 to 11,000 Å. However, internal contaminants on the camera optics limited normal operation to the range from 2840 to 11,000 Å.

In the Wide Field Camera (low-resolution) configuration, the FOV was 2.6' x 2.6', with a pixel size of 0.10". In the Planetary Camera (high-resolution) configuration, the FOV was 1.1' x 1.1' and the pixel size was 0.043". A variety of filters was available. The WF/PC received about 40% of the observing time on HST in Cycles 1-3, resulting in a large and diverse range of science data. All WF/PC data was severely affected by the spherical aberration. Unique and valuable data exists in the archive, but in terms of photometric accuracy, and especially image quality, data taken after the first servicing mission with (e.g., with the WFPC2) is superior.