Multiwavelength diffraction-limited imaging of the evolved carbon star IRC+10216. II.

High angular resolution images of IRC + 10216 taken at various bandpasses within the near-infrared H, K, and L bands are presented. The maps have the highest angular resolution yet recovered and were reconstructed from interferometric measurements obtained at the Keck I telescope in 1997 December and 1998 April, forming a subset of a seven-epoch monitoring program presented earlier by Tuthill and coworkers in Paper I. Systematic changes with observing wavelength are found and discussed in the context of present geometrical models for the circumstellar envelope. With these new high-resolution, multiwavelength data and contemporaneous photometry, we also revisit the hypothesis that the bright compact core of the nebula ( component A'') marks the location of the central carbon star. We find that directly measured properties of the core ( angular size, flux density, color temperature) are consistent with a reddened carbon star photosphere (line-of-sight tau(2.2) = 5.3).