These pages need updating! When I get time I will do this, in the meantime please first look at the instrument pages which will tell you what detector is on what instrument. However things are not as out-of-date as some of the dates might indicate. From around 2001 CTIO's funds were severely cut back, and detector development essentially stopped, so we were (and remain) unable to keep state-of-the-art. Sorry...
See
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At time-of-writing (Apr 10 2006) the following CTIO CCDs are being scheduled:
Eight SITe 2Kx4K: 4-m prime focus MOSAIC II Imager
SITe 2048 #3: 0.9m direct imaging
SITe 2048 #5: Schmidt telescope
Loral 3072x1024: 4m spectroscopy -- RC Spectrograph, Echelle Air Schmidt Camera Here are Loral notes.
Loral 1200x800: 1.5m spectroscopy Here are Loral notes.
SITe 2Kx4K: 4m spectroscopy -- Hydra
All these CCDs are thinned and have AR coatings, and have high QE (so below). All these CCDs are being operated by Arcon CCD Controllers. For information on Arcon, take a look at the Arcon Home Page.
A single Arcon controller has the ability to read four video channels simultaneously, and since some of our CCDs have multiple outputs, these can be read in parallel to shorten the read time. Our SITe (Tek) 1K and 2K CCDs all have four working amplifiers and so can be read QUAD, although for #5 one amplifier is noisier than the others, and #6 (not scheduled at this time, it used to be on the Echelle spectrograph and for direct imaging at the 1.5m, also the bench Echelle at the 1.5m) has a peculiar fault in the lower serial register, and so are usually read through two amplifiers. Both Loral CCDs can only be read through a single amplifier at a time, although both actually do have two working amplifiers. This is beacause the serial register cannot be clocked in two directions simultaneously.
The eight SITe 2Kx4K CCD's in the Mosaic Imager are thinned, AR-coated devices with performance much the same as the SITE 2K's, although UV QE is a little better. These are all Grade 2 CCDs, so you'll see a few bad columns here and there, and the flat fields are less smooth than we've come to expect from SITe, but basically they perform just fine. See the Mosaic WWW area for hard facts...
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Here is a plot of the measured Quantum Efficiencies of our CCDs.
Last update: April 10 2006
awalker@noao.edu