A Large‐Area CCD Camera for the Schmidt Telescope at the Venezuelan National Astronomical Observatory

We have designed, constructed, and put into operation a large‐area CCD camera that covers a large fraction of the image plane of the 1 m Schmidt telescope at Llano del Hato in Venezuela. The camera consists of 16 CCD devices arranged in a 4 × 4 mosaic covering 2 3 × 3 5 of sky. The CCDs are 2048 × 2048 LORAL devices with 15 μm pixels. The camera is optimized for drift‐scan photometry and objective‐prism spectroscopy. The design considerations, construction features, and performance parameters are described in the following paper.