Performance Of Hawk-I: The New High Acuity Wide-Field K-Band Imager - Art. No. 70140q

HAWK-I is the newly commissioned High Acuity Wide-field K-band Imager at the ESO Very Large Telescope. It is a 0.9-2.5 micron imager with a field of view of 7.50.5 arcmin sampled at 106 mas with four Hawaii2RG detectors. It has a full reflective design that was optimised for image quality and throughput.We present an overview of its performance as measured during the commissioning and first science runs. In particular, we describe a detector read-out mode that allows us to increase the useful dynamic range of the detector, and a distortion calibration resulting in < 5mas relative astrometry across the field.