EMCCD camera noise performance for the Brazilian tunable filter imager

摘要

We present in this paper a performance characterization of an Electron Multiplication CCD (EMCCD) camera which hasbeen deployed on the Brazilian Tunable Filter Imager (BTFI) instrument for the SOAR telescope in Chile. The BTFIinstrument has two e2v CCD207 EMCCDs with a format of 1600-by-1600 pixels. The CCD207s are full-frame devicesand are read out at a pixel rate of 10MHz with very low noise using an EMCCD controller (the CCD Controller forCounting Photons or CCCP for short) which was custom-built by a group based in the University of Montreal and is nowcommercialized by Nüvü Camēras. The first laboratory characterizations were done in Montreal in October, 2011 and the"first-light" results with the camera operating at the telescope are presented.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.