Development of a real-time data processing system for a prototype of the Tomo-e Gozen wide field CMOS camera
Ryou Ohsawa, Shigeyuki Sako, Hidenori Takahashi, Yuki Kikuchi, Mamoru Doi, Naoto Kobayashi, Tsutomu Aoki, Ko Arimatsu, Makoto Ichiki, Shiro Ikeda, Yoshifusa Ita, Toshihiro Kasuga, Hideo Kawakita, Mitsuru Kokubo, Hiroyuki Maehara, Noriyuki Matsunaga, Hiroyuki Mito, Kazuma Mitsuda, Takashi Miyata, Kiyoshi Mori · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2016
The Tomo-e Gozen camera is a next-generation, extremely wide field optical camera, equipped with 84 CMOS sensors. The camera records about a 20 square degree area at 2 Hz, providing “astronomical movie data”. We have developed a prototype of the Tomo-e Gozen camera (hereafter, Tomo-e PM), to evaluate the basic design of the Tomo-e Gozen camera. Tomo-e PM, equipped with 8 CMOS sensors, can capture a 2 square degree area at up to 2 Hz. Each CMOS sensor has about 2.6 M pixels. The data rate of Tomo-e PM is about 80 MB/s, corresponding to about 280 GB/hour. We have developed an operating system and reduction softwares to handle such a large amount of data. Tomo-e PM was mounted on 1.0-m Schmidt Telescope in Kiso Observatory at the University of Tokyo. Experimental observations were carried out in the winter of 2015 and the spring of 2016. The observations and software implementation were successfully completed. The data reduction is now in execution.