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Abstract

A detector head for housing self scanned silicon photo-detector arrays has been constructed for use in astronomy. It employs a unique frozen methanol cooling-"system and, although built specifically for the linear Reticon devices, it is capable of housing other linear or two dimensional monolithic arrays. This detector head is used with a control and data acquisition system that was developed at the University of British Columbia by the Institute of Astronomy and Space Science. A previous detector head, used with the above control system had incorporated a dry ice cooled 256A/17 Reticon array in a housing constructed, specifically for use on an F/1 concentric mirror spectrograph camera. This older device had many problems associated with it which made it difficult to operate and unreliable. With the 256A/17 Reticon mounted in the new camera head these problems have been eliminated. In particular, frosting no longer occurs, dark current has been reduced to a negligible level, and the readout noise has been reduced by a factor of two. As a result of this success, a 1024C/17 Reticon has been substituted for the 256 element array and there are plans for mounting a 100 x100 two dimensional array in this detector head.