The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a drift scan radio telescope operating across the 400–800 MHz band. CHIME is located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Penticton, BC, Canada. The instrument is designed to map neutral hydrogen over the redshift range 0.8–2.5 to constrain the expansion history of the universe. This goal drives the design features of the instrument. CHIME consists of four parallel cylindrical reflectors, oriented north–south, each 100 m × 20 m and outfitted with a 256-element dual-polarization linear feed array. CHIME observes a two-degree-wide stripe covering the entire meridian at any given moment, observing three-quarters of the sky every day owing to Earth’s rotation. An FX correlator utilizes field-programmable gate arrays and graphics processing units to digitize and correlate the signals, with different correlation products generated for cosmological, fast radio burst, pulsar, very long baseline interferometry, and 21 cm absorber back ends. For the cosmology back end, the
We report on the development of a wide-field near-infrared (0.9–2.5$\, \mu$m) camera built as a renewal of the existing classical Cassegrain 0.91 m telescope at Okayama Astrophysical Observatory. The optics system was replaced with fast hybrid optics (f/2.5) composed of forward Cassegrain optics and quasi-Schmidt optics, which results in an effective image circle of 52 mm diameter on the focal plane. The new camera, called the Okayama Astrophysical Observatory Wide-Field Camera (OAOWFC), has imaging capabilities in the $Y$, $J$, $H$, and $K_{\rm s}$ bands over a field of view of $0.^{\!\!\!\circ }47 \times 0.^{\!\!\!\circ }47$ with a HAWAII-1 HgCdTe PACE focal plane array. The primary purpose of OAOWFC is to search for variability in the Galactic plane in the $K_{\rm s}$ band and to promptly follow up transients. We have demonstrated a photometric repeatability of 2% in the densest field in the northern Galactic plane and successfully discovered previously unreported variable stars. The observations of OAOWFC are fully autonomous, and we started scientific operations in 2015 April.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10123358
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan
- ISSN:
- 0004-6264
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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