Development of large and fast cmos aps cameras at latt

¹ Laboratoire d'Astrophysique Toulouse Tarbes, Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, 57 avenue d'Azereix, 65000 Tarbes, France
² Laboratoire d'Astrophysique Toulouse Tarbes, Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, 14 avenue Edouard Belin, 31400 Toulouse, France
³ Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de l'Observatoire de Grenoble, CNRS, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France

Corresponding author: francis.beigbeder@ast.obs-mip.fr

Abstract

Since 2004, at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Toulouse Tarbes (LATT), we work with CMOS APS detectors, firstly to develop a large-field,high-resolution camera for the observation of the solar supergranulation, secondly to develop a fast camera for an adaptive optics test bench. In these two projects, we use detectors from FillFactory, now continued by Cypress Semiconductor Corporation: IBIS4-14000, IBIS-16000, LUPA-4000, 14 Mpixels, 16 Mpixels, 4 Mpixels respectively. The last one just reads in a 240 × 240 pixels window to obtain readout rate of 1000 Image/s. For these purposes we developed dedicated controllers to follow the high pixel rate and multi-output readout of this type of detectors. We also studied the characterization methods and measured the main parameters of these CMOS detectors to know their behaviour. Using these kinds of APS detectors in these two particular projects proves that we can already find niches to use CMOS detectors in astronomy taking advantage of their present specificities. Recent improvements like back illumination, noise reduction, should rapidly open news possibilities.