The Prime Focus Camera

First light: February 1984.

Last commissioning: May 1997.

Designed and built by: RGO.

Description: During the first commissioning nights, photographic plates were used as the default detector. The CCD Camera at the prime focus of the INT was commissioned from July 1985 to  May 1997. When it was first commissioned two CCD chips were in use: RCA 58612 (thinned and back-illuminated) and GEC P8600 (front-illuminated). The former has a significantly higher detective quantum efficiency, especially in the blue, but higher readout noise. On the other hand, the pixel size of the GEC chip was 22 µm, compared with 30 µm for the RCA chip (0.54 and 0.74 arc sec, respectively), so the former gives significantly better sampling in good seeing. The last CCD detector used was Tektronix, with a pixel size of 24 µm or 0.59 arc sec. It was replaced by the new CCD-mosaic Wide Field Camera. 

Some scientific highlights:

• Extragalactic distance scale (1992)
• Kuiper-Belt objects (1993)
• First detection of brown dwarfs (1995)
• The deepest ground-based count of galaxies (1995)
• First detection of the optical counterpart of a gamma-ray burst (1997)
• The Universe will expand forever (1998)