Astrophysics

Direct Imaging Camera at OAGH

The direct camera is an instrument that has a 0.2 arcsecond spatial resolution and obtains images of celestial objects in the U, B, V, R and I bands of the Johnson photometric system and in narrow band filters centered on the atomic transitions of hydrogen and oxygen.

Note: The following content is Technical and Scientific.

Overview

The direct imaging camera or Cámara Directa is mounted at the f/12 Cassegrain focus of the telescope, and is equipped with a filter-wheel capable of holding 11 filters at a time. At the image scale of 8.185''/mm, this amounts to approximately 0.20''/pix for the TK1024 CCD as the detector. Considering that the seeing is never better than 1'' at the telescope it is advisable to use the 2x2 or 3x3 or 4x4 binning option available in the PMIS software. This will not only reduce the image size in kbytes (without decreasing the field of view), but also will increase the S/N ratio (readout noise will be less) for the same exposure time