New detector

The installation of the NOTCam science array was planned for September, but it was postponed at the last moment and it was finally installed in NOTCam on October the 20th.

The installation was made with the help of Preben Nørregaard (CUO) and went very smoothly. Unfortunately the weather did not cooperate and no on-sky tests could be made, but test showed that the new array has much better cosmetics than the engineering grade array. Specifically, it is less effected by areas with bad pixels and the flat field is much smoother, showing less variations over both the short and large scale. The array has also a much larger range over which it is linear (upto $\sim$70000e$^-$ compared to $\sim$45000e$^-$), but the read-out noise was found to be slightly higher at 14-15 e$^-$ compared to 10-12 e$^-$.

We have not been able to test the new detector on the sky, but test taken with the lamps in the calibration unit indicate that there is no serious tilt of the array and (assuming the lamps are more or less stable) the sensitivity appears to be at least 30% better than for the old array. Clearly, this latter needs to be checked with standard stars as soon as we get clear sky on a NOTCam night.

For more information on the new array see

http://www.not.iac.es/instruments/notcam/sci-grade-arr.html

For a preliminary report on the commissioning tests see

http://www.not.iac.es/instruments/notcam/comm-sci-arr.txt