Science Operations

LBC

LBC Overview

The Large Binocular Cameras (LBCs) are two wide-field imagers mounted on the prime focus (F/1.14) swing arms of the LBT. The LBCs were built in Italy, with large contributions coming from the Observatories of Rome, Arcetri, Padova, Trieste and Bologna, and were accepted as LBTO facility instruments in October 2011. Two references which describe the instruments are:

LBC-Blue is mounted above the left (SX) mirror and is blue-optimized for observations from approximately 3500 to 6500 angstroms, while LBC-Red is mounted above the right (DX) mirror and is red-optimized for observations from approximately 5500 angstroms to 1 micron. The LBCs are designed to be used simultaneously, but can also be run independently.

The focal plane of each LBC consists of four 4608 x 2048 E2V detectors which cover a corrected field of view of ~25′ x 23′ at ~0.225″/pix (13.5 mic/pixel). The filters available in each camera are summarized in the table below.

LBC-Blue SDT_Uspec U-BESSEL B-BESSEL V-BESSEL g-SLOAN r-SLOAN
LBC-Red V-BESSEL R-BESSEL I-BESSEL r-SLOAN i-SLOAN z-SLOAN Y-FAN F970N20 TiO_784 CN_817