We describe the design and first-light early science performance of the Shane
Adaptive optics infraRed Camera-Spectrograph (ShARCS) on Lick Observatory's 3-m
Shane telescope. Designed to work with the new ShaneAO adaptive optics system,
ShARCS is capable of high-efficiency, diffraction-limited imaging and
low-dispersion grism spectroscopy in J, H, and K-bands. ShARCS uses a
HAWAII-2RG infrared detector, giving high quantum efficiency (>80%) and Nyquist
sampling the diffraction limit in all three wavelength bands. The ShARCS
instrument is also equipped for linear polarimetry and is sensitive down to 650
nm to support future visible-light adaptive optics capability. We report on the
early science data taken during commissioning.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes +
Instrumentation conference, paper 9148-11