<title>Characterization and mosaicking of CCDs and the applications to the Subaru wide-field camera (Suprime-Cam)</title>

Abstract

We are building an 8192 X 10240 CCD mosaic camera for 8 m Japanese Telescope (Subaru). The mosaic will consist of 2 X 5 arrays of 3-edge buttable 4096 X 2048 15 micrometer pixel imagers. Although several vendors have just started supplying the type of large format CCD, it is still in the development phase. Therefore, careful characterization and optimizations of individual CCD are critical. We describe the system used to evaluate several kinds of the CCDs. In addition to the CCD characterization, we also present the mechanical design of the mosaic focal plane which is an another issue to realize the large mosaic.