Camera for Quasars in Early Universe (CQUEAN)11This article includes data taken at the McDonald Observatory of The University of Texas at Austin.

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe describe the overall characteristics and the performance of an optical CCD camera system, Camera for Quasars in Early Universe (CQUEAN), which has been used at the 2.1 m Otto Struve Telescope of the McDonald Observatory since 2010 August. CQUEAN was developed for follow-up imaging observations of red sources such as high-redshift quasar candidates (z ≳ 5), gamma-ray bursts, brown dwarfs, and young stellar objects. For efficient observations of the red objects, CQUEAN has a science camera with a deep-depletion CCD chip, which boasts a higher quantum efficiency at 0.7–1.1 μm than conventional CCD chips. The camera was developed in a short timescale () and has been working reliably. By employing an autoguiding system and a focal reducer to enhance the field of view on the classical Cassegrain focus, we achieve a stable guiding in 20 minute exposures, an imaging quality with FWHM≥0.6′′ over the whole field (4.8′ × 4.8′), and a limiting magnitude of z = 23.4 AB mag at 5-σ with 1 hr total integration time.