Development of zodiacal light observation system: WIZARD

Abstract

We describe a new system (WIZARD: Wide-field Imager of Zodiacal light with ARray Detector) for the zodiacal light observation developed by a Korean and Japanese zodiacal light observation group. Since the zodiacal light is faint and wide-spread all over the sky, it consists of a very sensitive CCD camera of a quantum efficiency of 90% at 460(nm) and a wide angle lens with the field-of-view of 49x98 (degree). WIZARD is designed to measure the absolute brightness of diffuse sky in visible wavelengths. The zodiacal component will be separated from the integrated starlight, the airglow continuum and the scattered light in the atmosphere in the data reduction procedure. We got a first image by WIZARD in 2001 at Mauna Kea (4200m, Hawaii) under the collaboration with SUBARU Telescope. We observed the zodiacal light and the gegenschein in 2002 again, and got the excellent images. In this paper, we describe the design of WIZARD and report the performance examined by the laboratory measurements and the observations at Mauna Kea in 2002.