Development of a 7000 × 4000 Pixel Mosaic CCD Camera

The 12Kx8K CCD mosaic camera for the Palomar Transient Factory

The Palomar Transient Factory is an automated wide-field survey facility dedicated to identifying a wide range of transient phenomena. Typically, a new 7.5 square degree field will be acquired every 90 seconds with 66% observing efficiency, in g' band when the sky is dark, or in R band when the moon is up. An imaging camera with a 12Kx8K mosaic of MIT/LL CCDs, acquired from CFHT, is being repac...

MOA-cam3: a wide-field mosaic CCD camera for a gravitational microlensing survey in New Zealand

We have developed a wide-field mosaic CCD camera, MOA-cam3, mounted at the prime focus of the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) 1.8-m telescope. The camera consists of ten E2V CCD4482 chips, each having 2k×4k pixels, and covers a 2.2 deg field of view with a single exposure. The optical system is well optimized to realize uniform image quality over this wide field. The chips are c...

CCD Camera Gain Measurement

The gain of a CCD camera is the conversion between the number of electrons ("e-") recorded by the CCD and the number of digital units ("counts") contained in the CCD image. It is useful to know this conversion for evaluating the performance of the CCD camera. Since quantities in the CCD image can only be measured in units of counts, knowing the gain permits the calculation of quantities such as...

Methods for CCD Camera Characterization

In this paper we present methods for characterizing CCD cameras. Interesting properties are linearity of photometric response, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), sensitivity, dark current and spatial frequency response (SFR). The techniques to characterize CCD cameras are carefully designed to assist one in selecting a camera to solve a certain problem. The methods described were applied to a variety...

Kinetic PCR Analysis Using a CCD-camera