The new camera LAIA begins operations at the Joan Oró telescope

The new CCD camera, named LAIA (Large Area Imager for Astronomy) is an Andor iKon XL 230-84. It is installed at the cassegrain focus of the telescope and takes advantage of the same filter wheel previously used by the MEIA and MEIA2 instruments. The new LAIA camera has a detector with a 4k x 4k format, which provides a field of view of 0.45º x 0.45º in the TJO, about 4 times larger than that of the previous MEIA2 camera, and maintaining a similar resolution.

This upgrade of the main instrument of the telescope will provide higher quality data to the observers, allowing also to expand the capabilities of the TJO in fields such as the study of solar system objects, the detection and monitoring of novae and supernovae, or the tracking of satellites and space debris. The first tests carried out with LAIA at the TJO already show great improvements in the photometric and astrometric accuracy of the system thanks to the sensor characteristics of the new camera.

With the aluminizing of the primary mirror made last June, the beginning of operations of LAIA, and the upcoming start-up of the ARES spectrograph, the Joan Oró telescope will have seen the most important improvements in its first 10 years of operations, completed last October.