Development of a prototype of the Tomo-e Gozen wide-field CMOS camera // Shiro Ikeda

Proc. SPIE, pp. 99083P

Authors:

Shigeyuki Sako
Ryou Osawa
Hidenori Takahashi
Yuki Kikuchi
Mamoru Doi
Naoto Kobayashi
Tsutomu Aoki
Ko Arimatsu
Makoto Ichiki
Shiro Ikeda
Yoshifusa Ita
Toshihiro Kasuga
Hideyo Kawakita
Mitsuru Kokubo
Hiroyuki Maehara
Noriyuki Matsunaga
Hiroyuki Mito
Kazuma Mitsuda
Takashi Miyata
Kiyoshi Mori
Yuki Mori
Mikio Morii
Tomoki Morokuma
Kentaro Motohara
Yoshikazu Nakada
Kentaro Osawa
Shin-ichiro Okumura
Hiroki Onozato
Yuki Sarugaku
Mikiya Sato
Toshikazu Shigeyama
Takao Soyano
Masaomi Tanaka
Yuki Taniguchi
Ataru Tanikawa
Ken’ichi Tarusawa
Nozomu Tominaga
Tomonori Totani
Seitaro Urakawa
Fumihiko Usui
Junichi Watanabe
Jumpei Yamaguchi
Makoto Yoshikawa

URL:

Abstract:

The Tomo-e Gozen is an extremely wide-field optical camera for the Kiso 1.0-m Schmidt telescope. It is capable of taking consecutive frames with a field-of-view of 20 deg$^2$ and a sub-second time-resolution, which are achieved by 84 chips of 2k$\times$1k CMOS sensor. This camera adopts unconventional designs including a lightweight structure, a nonvacuumed and naturally-air cooled system, front-side-illuminated CMOS sensors with microlens arrays, a sensor alignment along a spherical focal plane of the telescope, and massive readout electronics. To develop technical components necessary for the Tomo-e Gozen and confirm a feasibility of its basic design, we have developed a prototype-model (PM) of the Tomo-e Gozen prior to the final-model (FM). The Tomo-e PM is equipped with eight chips of the CMOS sensor arranged in a line along the RA direction, covering a sky area of 2.0 deg$^2$. The maximum frame rate is 2 fps. The total data production rate is 80 MByte sec-1 at 2 fps, corresponding to approximately 3 TByte night$^-1$. After laboratory testing, we have successfully obtained consecutive movie data at 2 fps with the Tomo-e PM in the first commissioning run conducted in the end of 2015.