INT prime focus mosaic camera

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Abstract
The INT Prime Focus Mosaic Camera (INT PFC) is designed to provide a large field survey and supernovae search capability for the prime focus of the 2.5 m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT). It is a joint collaboration between the Royal Greenwich Observatory (UK), Kapteyn Sterrenwacht Werkgroep (Netherlands), and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories (USA). The INT PFC consists of a 4 chip mosaic utilizing thinned and anti-reflection coated CCDs. These are LORAL devices of the LICK3 design. They will be operated cryogenically in a purpose built camera assembly. A fifth CCD, of the same type, is co-mounted with the science array in the cryostat to provide autoguider functions. This cryostat then mounts to the main camera assembly at the prime focus. This assembly will include standard filters and a novel shutter wheel which has been specifically designed for this application. The camera will have an unvignetted field of 40 arcminutes and a focal ratio of f/3.3. This results in a very tight mechanical specification for co-planarity and flatness of the array of CCDs and also quite stringent flexure tolerance of the camera assembly. A method of characterizing the co- planarity and flatness of the array will be described. The overall system architecture will also be described. One of the main requirements is to read the whole array out within 100s, with less than 10e rms. noise and very low CCD cross talk.

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