The DES project is a 5 year imaging survey of the southern sky using the 4m Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo
International Observatory in Chile. A new wide field camera with a 2.2 degree diameter field of view has been built to
undertake this survey. The alignment of the large lenses for this camera poses a significant challenge as they have to be
aligned to a tolerance of ±50 micrometers. This paper presents the assembly and alignment process of the full optical system along with the test results. Also included is the predicted imaging performance from the as-built system.
The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration has completed construction of the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 3 square
degree, 570 Megapixel CCD camera which will be mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at CTIO. DECam will be
used to perform the 5000 sq. deg. Dark Energy Survey with 30% of the telescope time over a 5 year period. During the
remainder of the time, and after the survey, DECam will be available as a community instrument. All components of
DECam have been shipped to Chile and post-shipping checkout finished in Jan. 2012. Installation is in progress. A
summary of lessons learned and an update of the performance of DECam and the status of the DECam installation and
commissioning will be presented.
The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration is building the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 3 square degree, 520
Megapixel CCD camera which will be mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at CTIO. DECam will be used to
perform the 5000 sq. deg. Dark Energy Survey with 30% of the telescope time over a 5 year period. During the
remainder of the time, and after the survey, DECam will be available as a community instrument. Construction of
DECam is well underway. Integration and testing of the major system components has already begun at Fermilab and
the collaborating institutions.
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) will produce high quality images covering over 5000 square degrees of the sky,
with precise photometric redshifts between z = 0.2 to z = 1.3, using g, r, i, z and Y filters. The Dark Energy
Camera (DECam), under construction for this survey, consists of wide field corrector optics and a CCD detector
array that will give a 2.2 square degree field of view. It will be placed at the prime focus of the Blanco 4-meter
telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The Optical Science Laboratory (OSL) at
University College London (UCL) is undertaking the alignment of the five lenses in the imaging system. These
lenses range in diameter from 0.60 - 0.98 meters. The lenses must be held within tight tolerance limits in order
to meet the DES science requirements. The tolerances are especially driven by the accuracy in the measurement
of the weak lensing signal. This paper details the design for the cells that will hold the lenses and the alignment
procedure for the mounting of the lenses and cells. Also presented is the expected static shear distortion pattern
that will be generated and the impact of this pattern on the weak lensing signal measurement.
The DECam instrument, for the 4m Blanco telescope at CTIO, is a 5 lens element wide field camera giving a 2.2 degree
diameter field of view. The lenses are large, with the biggest being 980mm in diameter, and this poses challenges in
mounting and alignment. This paper reports the status of the production of the optics for the DECam wide field imager
Also presented are the design and finite element modelling of the cell design for the 5 lenses of the imager along with the
proposed alignment process.
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