The Goodman Acquisition Camera (GACAM)
The need for faster target acquisition for relatively bright targets (V≤18) in the Goodman High Throughput Spectrograph (HTS) led to the development at CTIO of a slit-viewing acquisition camera, hereafter GACAM (Tokovinin 2015: Goodman Acquisition Camera Instructions, July 14, 2015). GACAM is located inside the spectrograph. Its deployable arm places a diagonal mirror between the slit and the collimator. The image is captured by a Prosilica GigE camera of 659x493 (Horizontal xVertical) pixel format, with a scale 0.165”/pixel and field of view of 1.82' x 1.36'. The software was developed by R. Cantarruti. GACAM was designed to be simple to use and unobtrusive to the spectrograph. An added advantage of the GACAM is that all settings in the Goodman GUI can now stay fixed. In particular, there is no need to switch from imaging to spectroscopic mode
(i.e., grating and camera stay at fixed position), change the Region of Interest (ROI), readout mode, nor any other option in the spectrograph GUI.
Updated on January 18, 2024, 11:17 am