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LBC Overview

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 following table.

LBC-Blue LBC-Red
 UBessel  VBessel
 BBessel
 RBessel
 VBessel  IBessel
 gSloan  rSloan
 rSloan  iSloan
 SDT_Uspec  zSloan
   F972N20
   Y
 TiO_784
 
 CN_817