Leander McCormick Observatory
26-inch Instrumentation: Student ST-1001E CCD

The 26-inch has been equipped with two Santa Barbara Instruments CCD cameras, an ST-8 and ST-1001E. Information on the ST-8 is available here.


This shows the size difference of the ST-1001E
versus an ST-8 CCD. (Figure from www.sbig.com)
With financial assistance from the Commonwealth of Virginia, the McCormick family, and a National Science Foundation grant to Steven Majewski, the historic 26-inch Alvan Clark refractor at Leander McCormick Observatory has been upgraded to a state-of-the-art teaching facility for both graduate and undergraduate students. The telescope has been fitted with sensitive CCD cameras, allowing digital pictures to be captured from the telescope focal plane and stored for computer analysis. This new camera is more than 50 times more sensitive than the old photographic camera, which is still available and useful for taking pictures over larger areas.

The new ST-1001E is an improvement over the ST-8 for use with the refractor. The CCD detector has four times the area of the ST-8 allowing for wider views of the sky and provides a better match to the plate scale of the telescope. The ST-1001E has a plate scale 0.5 arcsec/pixel as opposed to the 0.2 arcsec/pixel of the ST-8. The imaging camera has been designed to operate in parallel with eyepiece viewing through the telescope, and use of the Astrovid camera. In this way, students may compare naked-eye views of celestial objects to those captured by the electronic camera. Both the eyepiece and camera will be operational for the popular McCormick Public Nights.

Even though the computer images are generally more detailed and show fainter structures than can be seen by the naked eye, there is still a romantic thrill people experience when given the opportunity to look directly through a large telescope. The new parallel mode of operating the 26-inch provides the flexibility for McCormick visitors have both experiences.

The ST-1001E is used with classes starting in the Fall of 2002. Online manuals for the ST-1001E CCD are available to local users.