Canon today announced that the Hyper Suprime-Cam ultra-wide-field second-generation prime focus camera, equipped with a corrector lens that was developed and produced by Canon has recently been installed in the Subaru Telescope and began undergoing performance testing on August 28, 2012. The large-scale optical-infrared Subaru Telescope, located at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), commenced scientific observation in 1999. Because the Hyper Suprime-Cam ultra-wide-field second-generation prime focus camera (HSC) was to be installed within the existing structure of the telescope, the corrector lens unit had to satisfy a number of strict restrictions in terms of mass and dimensions.
Canon succeeded in expanding the lens’s maximum angle of view from the 0.5 degrees realized by the first-generation Suprime-Cam (SC), to 1.5 degrees. Although the new corrector lens makes possible an angle of view approximately three times greater than that of the SC through the use of aspherical lenses, it employs only seven lens elements, the same number used in the SC, and has a lens diameter that is only approximately 1.6-times larger. Through a range of space observation equipment, including the ultra-wide-field HSC, the amount of time required to survey a region of the sky that had previously been estimated at 16 years is now expected to be possible in only two years.
