Mosaic Gets the Big Picture

NOAO has developed a large 8192 X 8192 CCD mosaic for wide-field optical imaging. Mosaic commissioning with thick CCDs is currently underway at the KPNO 4-m and 0.9-m telescopes; thinned CCDs will be installed as they become available. Eventually, the instrument will be available at both these telescopes and the CTIO 4-m. The Mosaic Imager features eight 2048 X 4096 15µm pixel CCDs arranged as an 8192 X 8192 pixel detector. The full mosaic is a square about 5 inches on a side. The field of view is 36' X 36' at the KPNO 4-m and 59' X 59' at the KPNO 0.9-m. This large field size, coupled with excellent image quality and sampling, should enable numerous scientific investigations that are presently impossible or impractical. The CCD Mosaic project represents the collaboration of many groups within NOAO, including the Instrumentation Projects Group, the ARCON group at CTIO, both IRAF and mountain programmers, scientific staff members from both north and south, and the KPNO mountain engineering and support teams. For more information, see the article in the KPNO section and the Mosaic page on the World Wide Web (http://www.noao.edu/kpno/mosaic/mosaic.html).

Caption:The images of the Moon (cover) and M33 (this page) were taken with the CCD Mosaic Imager and the Mayall 4-m telescope. The field of view is 36 arcmin on a side. The exposure time for the M33 image was 300 seconds. These images were processed only through dark subtraction and flat fielding in order to show the locations of the bad columns. Prior Mosaic experience shows that combining multiple shifted images eliminates the defects and fills the inter-CCD gaps.