Subaru Prime Focus Camera — Suprime-Cam

Abstract We have built an 80-mega pixels ($10240 \times 8192$) mosaic CCD camera, called Suprime-Cam, for the wide-field prime focus of the 8.2 m Subaru telescope. Suprime-Cam covers a field of view $34' \times 27'$, a unique facility among the 8–10 m class telescopes, with a resolution of ${0\rlap {.}{}^{\mathrm {\prime \prime }}202}$ per pixel. The focal plane consists of ten high-resistivity $2\mathrm{k} \times 4\mathrm{k}$ CCDs developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which are cooled by a large Stirling-cycle cooler. The CCD readout electronics was designed to be scalable, which allows the multiple read-out of tens of CCDs. It takes 50 seconds to readout entire arrays. We designed a filter-exchange mechanism…