Avid readers of these Newsletters will have followed with interest, or maybe horror, the saga of the past year of CCDs at the Schmidt telescope. For the last several months we have scheduled SITe 2K #5 at the Schmidt, which has provided high throughput and excellent image quality over a 1.7 square degrees field, albeit with 2.3" pixels producing very undersampled images. At the end of semester I 1998 this CCD moves into a dedicated dewar for use with Hydra at the Blanco telescope and is thus no longer available at the Schmidt. It will be replaced by the coated STIS 2K CCD until recently used at the Burrell Schmidt on Kitt Peak. This CCD should provide almost identical performance to the STIS CCD previously used at the Curtis Schmidt, except that it will probably only have two good amplifiers; thus readout time will be one minute. Pixel size is 2.0". See: (http://www.ctio.noao.edu/pfccd/pfccd.html#4 ) for a summary of the CTIO direct imaging CCD characteristics.
Alistair Walker (awalker@noao.edu)