A 2K×2K Astronomical High-speed CMOS Camera and Its Test Result

As an attempt to explore the usage of the very-fast-developing CMOS technology in astronomical observation,we developed a CMOS camera with LUPA-4000,a 2K×2K image sensor fabricated by Fillfactory.Compared to the widely used CCD image sensors,LUPA-4000 can be read out at a much higher speed,up to 66M pixel/s(using 2 on-chip output ADCs),and keep a relatively low noise level in the mean time.It means that a maximal frame-rate of 15 fps in full resolut ion can be acquired,and an even higher fps can be realized by means of sub-sampling and windowing readout.This makes it a potential powerful competitor to the CCD's dominant position established in the past several decades in the fields of short time,high luminance astronomical observations,such as the observations to the sun,the moon and the large planets in the solar system.Besides,the general merits of the CMOS sensors also make the camera system very compact,low power consumption,and convenient for use.In this paper,the main characters of the CMOS sensor we used,the constitution of the camera,and its performance evaluation by a laboratorial test are presented.