The Nassau Station Robotic Telescope Reference

The Apogee Camera

The Apogee Camera is the first camera we had do do direct imaging through the telescope. It has been replaced by the FLI Camera. The plan is maybe to put this camera on the finder telescope as a piggy-back wide field instrument

1. The detector is a front illuminated Kodak KAF1600 CCD (1536x1024 pixels) with 9 micron pixels. At full resolution this means each pixel is 0.15 arc seconds. The typical seeing disk is in excess of 18 pixels full width - half maximum.
2. The QE of the CCD is about 30-40% (see chart) with a full well depth of about 85,000 electrons (photons). Read noise is about 10-15 electrons.
    
3. The gain on the chip is 2.4 electrons per ADU (16 bit readout but only 15 are used which means the output ranges from 0 - 32768). The data is stored as 32 bit integer FITS images.
    
4. The CCD temperature is controlled thermoelectrically (Peltier cooling) and can be controlled to +/- 1C and is generally set to 35C below ambient.
    
5. A six position filter wheel is used. The filters are Johnson BV, Cousins RI with positions 5 and 6 empty.