The Dark Energy Camera Project

Documents on the Dark Energy Camera Project.
Mailing list archive

• March 8: submission of proposal to Fermilab PAC: The DES proposal (.pdf, .doc)
• March 15: letter of intent to NOAO: The letter of intent
• April 2-3: Fermilab PAC meeting presentation
  • DES Science Case Talk, Jim Annis: DES-PAC-04.ppt. (A version that prints better DES-PAC-04-print.pdf)
  • DES Instrumentation Talk, Brenna Flaugher: PAC-apr04-DECam.pdf
• April 15-16: DOE/NSF SAGENAP meeting
• June 7,8: Fermilab Director's Review (the Temple review)
• July 15: submission of proposal to NOAO
• August 30: submission of proposal to NSF
• October: selection announcement from NOAO

• NOAO presentations, Nov 17, 18 2003
• The Dark Energy Camera Workshop, Dec 5,6 2003
  
• Dark Energy Camera Design Workshop, Jan 22, 2004
  

• William's Dark Energy Poster DESPoster.ppt
• Jim Gunn's SDSS Filters
• William's analysis of CTIO weather
• Steve's optics talk
• Brenna's talk on Feb 13, 2004
• Jim's Survey Strategy talk on June 7, 2004

Note that the Y filter is discussed on the UKIDDS page.

• Camera Science Requirement Flowdown, v2 (and v1)

• Optical Followup to the South Pole Telescope,
  • Cosmology with Sunyaev-Zeldovich Cluster Surveys, Sept 2003
  • "Hmmm, this project looks feasible."
• Future Directions in Ground Based Optical/IR Cosmology,
  • Fermilab Long Range Planning on Astrophysics, Oct 13, 2003.
  • "Now, why would we do this, exactly?"
• deCam,
  • Fermilab Silicon Detector Facility, Oct 28, 2003
  • "And what would we have to do, exactly?"
• A call for astronomical camera R&D at Fermilab
  • Open mike time at Fermilab Long Range Planning on Detector R&D, Oct 30, 2003.
  • "In any case, camera R&D is the Right Thing To Do."
• Science Case
  • Presentation during the Fermi/Illinois trip to NOAO, Nov 18, 2003.
  • "Here is the science, and the experiment design that flows from them."
• The Dark Energy Survey
  • Presentation during the Fermilab Alvin Symposium, June 1, 2004
  • "We have come a long way since halloween."

• A quick science justification

• The SDSS Camera
  • Gunn et al 1998 go over many design questions in detail.
• Megacam
  • if we did nothing but to clone Megacam, we'd succeed.
  • the design paper: Development of MegaCam a very good paper, laying out the requirements and design solutions
  • 40 CCDs I: Procurement, Testing, and Lab Results. Commerical CCDs are good!
  • 40 CCDs II: Design and Test of Front End Electronics A Kilowatt oven at the prime focus is bad!
  • Marconi/EEV EEV 42-90, the CCD of MegaCam. The company website is at e2vtechnologies
  • Note that E2V sells deep depletion CCDs, along the lines of Berkeley's HiRho.
  • Jordan from e2v's 2003 SPIE paper on large CCD mosic technology. Very good.
• CCDs
  • UV-Optical CCDs overview of state of the art in space astro-ccds.
  • e2v
    • 2048x4600 CCD data sheet
    • 2048x4600 deep depletion CCD data sheet
  • HiRho CCD project, the Berkeley CCD design:
    • Fully Depleted CCD Development Bebek et al 2003.
    • High Performance CCD on high resistivity silicon
    • Science Beat Background
  • John Tonry and PanSTARRS OTA:
    • Tonry 2002? OTA's as cheap devices
    • The Orthogonal Transfer CCD science paper
    • Photometric Observations using OTAs OTAs on the telescope.
  • CMOS
    • CMOS with Extended NIR Response
    • Rockwell pitch

Possible Observing Area

Map of the southern galactic cap. The image is the Dirbe dust map and the red graticle shows equatorial coordinates superimposed on the galactic coordinates. The green area is a strawman SPT survey area. The blue area is a strawman optical survey coming in at 5070 sq-degrees. The long equatorial stripe overlaps the SDSS deep Southern Stripe with its extensive spectroscopy and high quality photometry. The south galactic pole happens to cross CTIO roughly at midnight on Halloween. so this is also an alt-az plot at the site that night and time.

A reasonable strategy is to ask for -all- of the time on the telescope from August 15 to December 15 for several years.