PANIC in the lab: status before commissioning

PANIC is the new PAnoramic Near-Infrared camera for Calar Alto, a joint project by the MPIA in Heidelberg, Germany, and the IAA in Granada, Spain. It can be operated at the 2.2m or 3.5m CAHA telescopes to observe a field of view of 30'x30' or 15'x15' respectively, with a sampling of 4096x4096 pixels. It is designed for the spectral bands from Z to K, and can be equipped with additional narrow-band filters. The instrument is close to completion and will be delivered to the observatory in Spain in fall 2014. It is currently in the last stage of assembly, where the optical elements are being aligned, which will be followed by final laboratory tests of the instrument. This paper contains an update of the recent progress and shows results from the optical alignment and detector performance tests.