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New Loral 1K CCD for Spectroscopy at the 1.5-m Coming Soon (1Jun95) (from CTIO, NOAO Newsletter No. 42, June 1995) Work on the implementation of the Loral 1200 X 800 CCD for spectroscopy at the 1.5-m telescope has been proceeding slowly due to shortage of resources. At the time of writing, testing of the control electronics using an engineering grade CCD has begun. If no unforeseen problems are encountered when the science grade CCD is installed, we may be ready for a first engineering run at the telescope in mid-May. Our goal remains to make this system available at some point during second semester. This particular CCD only has a single layer AR coating and was somewhat differently optimized. It therefore has lower UV/blue QE than the Loral 3K CCD described in the preceding article, but it is still substantially higher than that of the present GEC CCD. Since 3 Loral pixels are nearly the same size as 2 GEC pixels the resolution in angstroms achieved when using a given grating should be very similar with either CCD. Considering only the larger size of the Loral CCD, the wavelength coverage should be a factor 1.4 greater. However, vignetting and image quality problems due to the spectrograph camera may limit the useful range to somewhat less than this. This CCD is expected to fringe redward of 7500A, but we will not know how severe a problem this will be until after the first tests with the spectrograph. Updated information on this system will be posted on the CTIO mosaic page http://ctio.noao.edu/ as it becomes available. Steve Heathcote (sheathcote@noao.edu), Bob Schommer (rschommer@noao.edu), Roger Smith (rsmith@noao.edu)
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