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Дата изменения: Mon Oct 7 06:14:11 1996
Дата индексирования: Mon Oct 1 20:13:48 2012
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Поисковые слова: heart nebula
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The Mega-Pixel Approach: The 2048x2048 CCD
The McDonald 30-inch Prime Focus camera (f/2.98) uses a thick, front-side
illuminated Loral-Fairchild 2048x2048 CCD with a Metachrome II coating.
This device has an active imaging area of
47x47 mm spread over 4 million pixels. A typical 1-meter telescope
has an f/3.0 -- f/4.0 primary mirror.
Hence, placing a 2048x2048 CCD at the Prime Focus would result in
an angular field of view of approximately 1 square degree. The
30-inch telescope at the McDonald Observatory has such a setup
which results in a total field size of 46 x 46 square arcminutes.
The CCD data can be flatfielded well over the entire field size.
Figure 1 (683 Kbytes) shows an image, taken in the Blue Band, of the Pegasus
cluster of galaxies. The red arrows point to some galaxies in
the field. These galaxies all have relatively high contrast with
respect to the background night sky and hence are easily detected.
The inset shows an example of an
extremely diffuse galaxy (known as
Low Surface Brightness Galaxies ) that can be discovered with this kind of
data. Note how noisy the sky appears in this contrast setting as
the galaxy itself is only 2% above the sky background.
These kinds of galaxies, previously unknown, represent a new population of objects that
has recently been discovered by members of our team (see May 1994
issue of Discover magazine) using wide field CCD imaging techniques.
Typically, prime focus imaging requires the fabrication
of an expensive corrector plate so that good image quality is maintained
over the entire field. This was done for the McDonald 30-inch.
However, most 1-m class telescopes do not have a budget for such a
corrector and hence continue to operate at the Cassegrain focus,
thereby reducing the field size by typically a factor of 3. Nonetheless,
field sizes of ~ 20x20 arcminutes can be achieved with a 2048x2048
detector at Cass. This is still relatively wide field imaging by
traditional professional astronomical standards. Figure 2 (319 Kbytes) shows a
blue band image of the Hercules cluster of galaxies obtained using
a 2048x2048 Textronix CCD detector on the back of the Kitt Peak National
Observatory 0.9-m telescope. The improved image scale offered at
CASS is helpful in measuring the details of galaxies which have angular
sizes that are less than one arcminute, as in the case here.
The Newtonian Focus of the Burrell-Schmidt telescope
at Kitt Peak National Observatory is capable of producing a field
size of slightly larger than one square degree. Figure 3 (685 kbytes) shows a
deep V-band CCD image taken with this system. The extended objects in center
of the field is a dwarf spheroidal companion to M31 (named And I).
This exposure shows that it can be resolved into individual stars to
some extent. The low galactic latitude of this field also means
there are lots of foreground Milky Way stars present.
Special care
and data processing is required for data taking with this telescope
as the optics of the Schmidt are known for aliasing the light from
bright sources that are off the field onto the detector. This produces
a series of ghost images which can be identified and removed, to some
extent, the data processing stage. Thus, with some work, a very old
telescope can be made into a state-of-the art wide field digital
camera.
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The Electronic Universe Project
e-mail: nuts@moo.uoregon.edu