The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Photometric Camera

Abstract

We have constructed a large format mosaic CCD camera for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The camera consists of two arrays, a photometric array which uses 30 2048 x 2048 SITe/Tektronix CCDs (24 micron pixels) with an effective imaging area of 720 square cm, and an astrometric array which uses 24 400 x 2048 CCDs with the same pixel size, which will allow us to tie bright astrometric standard stars to the objects imaged in the photometric camera. The instrument will be used to carry out photometry essentially simultaneously in five color bands spanning the range accessible to silicon detectors on the ground in the time-delay- and-integrate (TDI) scanning mode. The photometric detectors are arrayed in the focal plane in six columns of five chips each such that two scans cover a filled stripe 2.5 degrees wide. This paper presents engineering and technical details of the camera.