Chimera

The Steward Observatory SSA team created Chimera to operate regularly on the Kuiper 61 inch telescope. Chimera is a high-speed photometer with simultaneous three-color photometry in the Sloan r’ (562-695 nm), i’ (695-844 nm), and z’ (826-920 nm) bands. The optical design produces well-corrected fields of view of 9.7 x 9.7 arcmin in the z’ band and 6.0 x 6.0 arcmin in r’ and i’ bands. The relativley large field of view (compared to similar instruments) facilitates acquisition and tracking of moving satellites and allows for a variety of photometric calibration methods. The relatively simple optical design uses a wide-field collimator, two dichroic beam splitters, and three re-imaging lens assemblies. Chimera utilizes three Princeton Instruments Pro-EM HS cameras, which record images at rates up to 61 fps in full-frame full-resolution mode. Rates up to 1000 fps are possible by cropping and or binning the detector.