QUOTA sees First Light at WIYN!

The WIYN consortium is building the One Degree Imager (ODI) for its 3.5m telescope, located at Kitt Peak. ODI will deliver WIYN’s excellent seeing over a one square degree field of view, and further enhance the image quality by actively compensating tip/tilt image motion using Orthogonal Transfer Array CCDs. These devices allow to move electrons in the detector in both the x and y directions in 1’ big cells.

QUOTA (Quad-OTA) is a prototype camera for ODI, featuring an array of four OTA detectors with 8kx8k pixels (instead of 64 for ODI, resulting in 32kx32k pixels). We report from QUOTA’s successful first light campaign as a static imager in October 2006 and subsequent engineering runs at the WIYN telescope.