The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Photometric Camera

TLDR

The paper details the engineering and technical specifications of the camera. The camera comprises a photometric array of 30 2048×2048 CCDs and an astrometric array of 24 400×2048 CCDs, enabling simultaneous five‑band photometry across a 25‑degree stripe using time‑delay–and–integrate scanning. A large‑format mosaic CCD camera for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been constructed.

Abstract

We have constructed a large-format mosaic CCD camera for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The camera consists of two arrays, a photometric array that uses 30 2048 × 2048 SITe/Tektronix CCDs (24 μm pixels) with an effective imaging area of 720 cm2 and an astrometric array that uses 24 400 × 2048 CCDs with the same pixel size, which will allow us to tie bright astrometric standard stars to the objects imaged in the photometric camera. The instrument will be used to carry out photometry essentially simultaneously in five color bands spanning the range accessible to silicon detectors on the ground in the time-delay–and–integrate (TDI) scanning mode. The photometric detectors are arrayed in the focal plane in six columns of five chips each such that two scans cover a filled stripe 25 wide. This paper presents engineering and technical details of the camera.