Involved people at OAB: Greggio
OmegaCAM is a wide field optical CCD camera which will be mounted on the
VLT Survey Telescope (VST) on Paranal. The main
purpose of VST, a 2.6 m telescope which is being built by the
Capodimonte Observatory and will be managed by ESO, is to carry on long
term surveys, and to provide targets for the VLT.
OmegaCAM will be equipped with a 16K
16K pixels CCD mosaic, to cover
1 square degree field of view, and is expected to become operative during
the year 2003. The camera is built by a consortium of three European
institutions and ESO. The institutions are: Universitaets Sternwarte Muenchen
(Germany), NOVA-Kapteyn Instituut Groningen (The Netherlands) and
Padova Observatory (Italy), each coordinating the activity of other
institutes in their home countries, which are associated to the project.
Bologna participates to the OmegaCAM project with the contribution of
1.5 man/year provided by Greggio, as responsible of the project documentation.
In the year 2001 the project went through the phase of preparation of the Final Design Review, which took place on September 21, 2001. After taking care of a few recommendations from the ESO board, OmegaCAM has successfully passed FDR, and the manifacturing phase has already started. Five major team meetings have taken place during 2001, to proceed toward the final design of the instrument. (Goettingen in January and December; Padova in March; Munich in May and Naples in July). The choice of the filters has been defined and the first filters have just been ordered at SAGEM (France).