Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.4723t&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #47.23; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.807
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The world's largest and most advanced digital camera has been installed on the Pan-STARRS-1 (PS1) telescope on Haleakala, Maui. Built at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Institute for Astronomy (IfA) in Honolulu, the gigapixel camera will capture images that will be used to scan the skies for killer asteroids, and to create the most comprehensive catalog of stars and galaxies ever produced. The CCD sensors at the heart of the camera were developed in collaboration with Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The image area, which is about 40 cm across, contains 60 identical silicon chips, each of which contains 64 independent imaging circuits. Each of these imaging circuits contains approximately 600 x 600 pixels, for a total of about 1.4 gigapixels in the focal plane. The CCDs themselves employ the innovative technology called "orthogonal transfer." Splitting the image area into about 4,000 separate regions in this way has three advantages: data can be recorded more quickly, saturation of the image by a very bright star is confined to a small region, and any defects in the chips only affect only a small part of the image area. The CCD camera is controlled by an ultrafast 480-channel control system developed at the IfA. The individual CCD cells are grouped in 8 x 8 arrays on a single silicon chip called an orthogonal transfer array (OTA), which measures about 5 cm square. There are a total of
60 OTAs in the focal plane of each telescope.
Isani Sidik
Onaka Peter
Tonry John L.
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