MegaCam is an imaging camera with a 1 square degree field of view for the new prime focus of the 3.6 meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. This instrument will mainly be used for large deep surveys ranging from a few to several thousands of square degrees in sky coverage and from 24 to 28.5 in magnitude. The camera is built around a CCD mosaic approximately 30 cm square, made of 40 large thinned CCD devices for a total of 20 K x 18 K pixels. It uses a custom CCD controller, a closed cycle cryocooler based on a pulse tube, a 1 m diameter half-disk as a shutter, a juke-box for the selection of the filters, and programmable logic controllers and fieldbus network to control the different subsystems. The instrument was delivered to the observatory on June 10, 2002 and first light is scheduled in early October 2002.

Date Published: 7 March 2003
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 4841, Instrument Design and Performance for Optical/Infrared Ground-based Telescopes, (7 March 2003); doi: 10.1117/12.459890

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4841:
Instrument Design and Performance for Optical/Infrared Ground-based Telescopes
Masanori Iye; Alan F. M. Moorwood, Editor(s)