paper

Subaru Prime Focus Camera -- Suprime-Cam --

arXiv:astro-ph/0211006 · doi:10.1093/pasj/54.6.833

Abstract

We have built an 80-mega pixels (10240 X 8192) mosaic CCD camera, called Suprime-Cam, for the wide-field prime focus of the 8.2 m Subaru telescope. Suprime-Cam covers a field of view 34' X 27', a unique facility among the the 8-10 m class telescopes, with a resolution of 0.''202 per pixel. The focal plane consists of ten high-resistivity 2k X 4k CCDs developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which are cooled by a large stirling-cycle cooler. The CCD readout electronics was designed to be scalable, which allows the multiple read-out of tens of CCDs. It takes 50 seconds to readout entire arrays. We designed a filter-exchange mechanism of the jukebox type that can hold up to ten large filters (205 X 170 X 15 mm^3). The wide-field corrector is basically a three-lens Wynne-type, but has a new type of atmospheric dispersion corrector. The corrector provides a flat focal plane and an un-vignetted field of view of 30' in diameter. The achieved co-planarity of the focal array mosaic is smaller than 30 micron peak-to-peak, which realizes mostly the seeing limited image over the entire field. The median seeing in the Ic-band, measured over one year and a half, is 0.''61. The PSF anisotropy in Suprime-Cam images, estimated by stellar ellipticities, is about 2% under this median seeing condition. At the time of commissioning, Suprime-Cam had the largest survey speed, which is defined as the field of view multiplied by the primary mirror area of the telescope, among those cameras built for sub-arcsecond imaging.

22 pages, 26 figures, accepted for publication in PASJ, minor corrections, for a higher resolution ps file, see http://anela.mtk.nao.ac.jp/outgoing/suppaper/suprime.ver1.ps.gz (1.6MB)

Cited by in corpus (531)