A Large Area CCD Camera for the Schmidt Telescope at the Venezuelan National Astronomical Observatory

Abstract

We have designed, constructed and put into operation a large area CCD camera that covers a large fraction of the image plane of the 1 meter Schmidt telescope at Llano del Hato in Venezuela. The camera consists of 16 CCD devices arranged in a 4 x 4 mosaic covering 2.3 degrees x 3.5 degrees of sky. The CCDs are 2048 x 2048 LORAL devices with 15 micron pixels. The camera is optimized for drift scan photometry and objective prism spectroscopy. The design considerations, construction features and performance parameters are described in the following article.

34 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in PASP

References in corpus (4)

• Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 High-Redshift Supernovae
• The QUEST RR Lyrae Survey: Confirmation of the Clump at 50 kpc and Other Over-Densities in the Outer Halo
• Discovery of the Bright Trans-Neptunian Object 2000 EB173
• Discovery of the Optical Transient of the Gamma Ray Burst 990308

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• 25 Orionis: A Kinematically Distinct 10 Myr Old Group in Orion OB1a
• Mc Neil's Nebula in Orion: The Outburst History
• The QUEST Large Area CCD Camera
• A spectroscopic census in young stellar regions: the Sigma Orionis cluster
• No Excess of RR Lyrae Stars in the Canis Major Overdensity
• The QUEST RR Lyrae Survey: III. The Low Galactic Latitude Catalogue
• A comprehensive view of the Virgo Stellar Stream
• Young Exoplanet Transit Initiative (YETI)
• Searching for tidal tails around $\omega$ Centauri using RR Lyrae Stars
• The low mass star and sub-stellar populations of the 25 Orionis group
• New Quasars Detected via Variability in the QUEST1 Survey
• The CIDA-UCM-Yale Shallow Survey for Emission Line Galaxies
• The rotation period distributions of 4--10 Myr T Tauri stars in Orion OB1: New constraints on pre-main-sequence angular momentum evolution
• A large-scale optical-near infrared survey for brown dwarfs and very low-mass stars in the Orion OB1 association
• Searching for RR Lyrae stars in the Canis Major Overdensity
• Development of ARIES Baker-Nunn camera to a wide-field Imaging Telescope with CCD