1.4 Giga pixel CCD Camera

[vincentnm]

to be installed on the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System in Hawai.

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/New_Telescope_Features_Giant_CCD_Camera_999.html

[dph1nm]

Ah yes, I gave a talk on this at Kielder. Durham University is involved in the project, and I am currently testing out data from the camera.

The camera is actually 60 (8x8 without the corners) chunks of silicon (known as OTAs), each composed of 8x8 cells of 600x600 pixels (each pixel is 0.26 arsec across). The whole thing measures about 0.4m on a side! The cells are all read out independently, meaning the whole camera can be read out (and written to disk) in about 7 seconds! The camera is designed so that each OTA can do on-chip imaging sharpening (by shuffling the charge around electronically) to get the best possible image quality - this feature is not expected to be switched on for a year or so though.

Here is a test image taken some time ago (actually a stack of several dithered images) which gives you an idea of the scale. The optical quality of the telescope has been improved a lot since this was taken BTW.

NigelM

[narrowbandpaul]

are these sensors back thinned...and who manufacters them?

what cooling is employed?

what filters are available?...and how big must they be!

[Sam]

Cool camera!

[dph1nm]

are these sensors back thinned...and who manufacters them?

what cooling is employed?

what filters are available?...and how big must they be!

(1) They are 70um thick, backside illuminated, MIT Lincoln-Labs CCDs. I think this means they are not so thin as to suffer fringing, which is the usual problem with thinned chips, but still have about 65% QE.

(2) Liquid nitrogen

(3) All broadband: g (475nm), r (625nm), i (750nm), z (875nm), y (1000nm)

NigelM

[narrowbandpaul]

cool...thinning is a process that is more complicated than it sounds....

[George]

Wonder if Bern has any in stock yet :laughing2:

[NickH]

he's still hagglling the price with the supplier

:laughing3: :laughing3: :laughing3:

[narrowbandpaul]

70um is thicker than most backthinned chips...