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 developed a CCD camera that can observe wide fields on the sky. We tested the field of views using various lenses. For cooling the CCD chip, we used a thermoelectric cooling device and tested the cooling efficiency. This camera will continuously observe a part of the sky. The data from the camera will be used to decide the current weather condition by the real-time star counting program (SCount) which will be developed later.

We developed an observation program for a 2K CCD camera, which was newly attached at the SOAO (Sobaeksan Optical Astronomy Observatory) 61cm telescope. The program was designed to control the telescope as well as the CCD camera and to monitor the CCD image quality, with very easy under the window-based graphical user interface (GUI). Furthermore, applying the automated differential photometric algorithm, we can obtain the instrumental magnitudes of several variable and comparison stars in real-time. Simultaneous photometry enables us to get precise differential magnitudes of variable stars even if the weather condition is not photometric. This new observation system has been using for many astronomical observations from September, 2001.

We present the characteristics of the 2K CCD camera at the Bohyunsan Optical Astronomy Observatory of the Korea Astronomy Observatory at the time of its development. The purpose of this paper is to support the observers who may need detailed information on the characteristics of the camera and to provide helpful information on the optimization' of a CCD camera for those who try to develop their own camera. The 2K CCD camera was optimized to have a gain of 1.8e−/ADU and a read out noise of 7e− from an experiment using radioactive 55 Fe X-ray source. The charge transfer efficiency was measured as 0.9999976 for serial and 0.9999942 for parallel direction, which means 0.5% charge loss along the serial direction and 1.2% along the parallel direction across the chip. The quantum efficiency of the camera was measured from an experiment using a homogeneous light source consisting of a halogen lamp and an integrating sphere with a monochromator. The resulting quantum efficiency of the camera peaked at the wavelength range 600-700 nm with the value of ＼-0.89 .

The development of universal CCD camera control software for all BOAO CCD camera systems is proposed. The new software, running under Sun SPARCstation and motif based X window system with SunOS 4.1.3 operating system, replaces existing control software based on NeXTstation color and NeXTstep 2.1 operating system which is no more produced now. Several new features of the new software is introduced, some of which are 1) the image contrast is enhanced by color manipulation and display, 2) image zooming and trimming, 3) any size of image can be displayed in the scrolled window, and 4) the offset between telescope pointing position and CCD center is easily calculated by alt-azi map. Along with the above new features, the new software has advantages including ease of maintenance and upgrading and elimination of risk caused by hardware damage. Since September 1, the software beta version is being used by observers and there is not seen severe problem regarding the software itself, but several requests to equip more features to the software will be mirrored to future release.

We have built a near-infrared imaging camera with a PtSi array detector manufactured by the Mitsubishi Company. The PtSi detector is sensitive in the wavelength range 1 to 5μm 5μm . Quantum efficiency of PtSi is much lower than that of InSb and HgCdTe types. However, the PtSi array has advantages over the latter ones: (i)The read-out noise is very low; (ii)the characteristics of the array elements arc uniform and stable; (iii)it is not difficult to make a large PtSi array; and (iv) consequently the price is affordably low. The array used consists of 512×512 512×512 pixels and its size is 10.2mm×13.3mm 10.2mm×13.3mm . The filter wheel of the camera is equipped with J, H, K filters, and an aluminum plate for measuring the dark noise. The dewar is cooled with liquid nitrogen. We have adopted a method of installing the clock pattern and the observing softwares in the RAM, which Gill he easily used for other systems. We have developed a software with a pull-down menu for operating the camera and data acquisition. The camera has been tested by observing δ δ Orionis.