Focal Reducer for McDonald Otto Struve Telescope

The CQUEAN (Camera for QUasars in EArly uNiverse) is an optical CCD camera optimized for observation of high redshift objects. It is going to be attached to the cassegrain focus of 2.1m telescope at McDonald Observatory, USA. We are making a focal reducer for CQUEAN to secure a larger field of view. The focal reducer is composed of four spherical lens, and it reduces the focal length of telescope by one third. We designed the lens configuration, performed tolerance analysis, and estimated the optical performance with ZEMAX. The differences in optical performace with/without filters were also investigated. The result from ZEMAX shows that the system has ample margin of errors for median seeing of 1.2" at McDonald observatory. Even with aberration and alignment tolerance, the performance is better than the original requirement. The lenses are now being made, and the lens barrel and an adapter for assembly of the Andor CCD camera and the filter wheel is now under designing process. We expect that the manufacturing of the focal reducer system as well as its optical test will be finished by April 2010.