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arXiv · astro-ph/0211006

Subaru Prime Focus Camera -- Suprime-Cam --

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.

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Satoshi Miyazaki, Yutaka Komiyama, Maki Sekiguchi, Sadanori Okamura, Mamoru Doi, Hisanori Furusawa, Masaru Hamabe, Katsumi Imi, Masahiki Kimura, Fumiaki Nakata, Norio Okada, Masami Ouchi, Kazuhiro Shimasaku, Masafumi Yagi, Naoki Yasuda. 2002-11-17. Subaru Prime Focus Camera -- Suprime-Cam --. https://doi.org/10.1093/pasj%2F54.6.833

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