ESSEX, England, April 14 -- Megacam, the wide-field camera mounted on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, recently captured its first images using custom-built charged coupled devices (CCDs) made by e2v technologies.
Megacam houses forty 2 k x 4.5 k pixel, three-edge buttable CCDs, making it the largest CCD mosaic ever constructed for astronomical research, e2v said. The camera and its CCD mosaic provide images with a resolution of 380 million pixels.
e2v said it supplied image sensors for the mosaic and delivered smaller guide CCDs for peripheral telescope functions over two years, then spent two years integrating them into the Megacam.
e2v is also working with the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop several hundred large-format CCDs for the ESA's GAIA space astronomy mission.
For more information, visit: www.e2vtechnologies.com