The characteristics of the BOES (Bohyunsan Observatory Echelle Spectrograph) CCD camera is presented. In order to get optimum gain and readout noise of the CCD, we examine the variation of the gain and readout noise by changing the value of output drain voltage of the CCD and measuring the gain using transfer curve, which is defined as the plot of variance versus mean exposure level of a homogeneous light onto the CCD surface. The gain and readout noises are optimised to be 0.5e −/ADU and 3e−, which is good for highest signal-to-noise ratio and contrast for the low light level characteristics of the BOES. We also measure the dark count of the CCD by getting five dark images with 3600 seconds exposure time. The mean dark count from median stacked dark images is essentially zero. A table of positions of defected pixels is also presented.

A CCD camera for the BOES (Bohyunsan Observatory Echelle Spectrograph) has been developed. The camera consists of a 2048 × 4096 format CCD, a SDSU Gen-I CCD controller, and a continuous flow cryostat (CFC) designed by the ESO. In order to control the CCD under SDSU Gen-I controller, the voltage level of all the biases and clocks were lowered by -6V. The CFC showed cooling time of about 10 hour, after which the chip temperature settled down with variation less than ±1°C. The final chip temperature is around -105 °C with the setting value for the CFC as -170 °C

We have developed a near real-time flare alerting system which (1) downloads the latest GOES-l0 1-8 Å X-ray flux 1-min data by an automated ftp program and shell scripts, (2) produces a beep sound in a simple IDL widget program when the flux is larger than a critical value, and (3) makes it possible to do a wireless alerting by a set of portable transceivers. Thanks to the system, we have made successful Ha flare observations by the Solar Flare Telescope in Bohyunsan Optical Astronomy Observatory. This system is expected to be helpful for ground-based flare observers.