Evaluation of scientific CMOS sensors for sky survey applications

TL;DR

This paper evaluates scientific CMOS sensors for sky survey use, focusing on their stability, linearity, and persistence through lab and on-sky tests, highlighting their potential as alternatives to CCD detectors.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive characterization of sCMOS sensors for astronomical surveys, including stability, linearity, and on-sky performance, which was previously lacking.

Findings

sCMOS sensors show good temporal stability and linearity

Image persistence is manageable for sky survey applications

On-sky tests demonstrate suitability for wide-field astronomical imaging

Abstract

Scientific CMOS image sensors are a modern alternative for a typical CCD detectors, as they offer both low read-out noise, large sensitive area, and high frame rates. All these makes them promising devices for a modern wide-field sky surveys. However, the peculiarities of CMOS technology have to be properly taken into account when analyzing the data. In order to characterize these, we performed an extensive laboratory testing of two Andor cameras based on sCMOS chips -- Andor Neo and Andor Marana. Here we report its results, especially on the temporal stability, linearity and image persistence. We also present the results of an on-sky testing of these sensors connected to a wide-field lenses, and discuss its applications for an astronomical sky surveys.