Commissioning, on sky performance and first operations of JPCam, a 1.2 Gpixel camera for the wide-field 2.6m Javalambre Survey Telescope

Commissioning results, on-sky performance and first operations of the Javalambre Panoramic Camera (JPCam) are presented in this paper. JPCam is a 1.2 Gpixel camera deployed on the 2.6m, large field-of-vie Javalambre Survey Telescope (JST250) at the Observatorio Astrofisico de Javalambre. JPCam has been conceived to perform J-PAS, a photometric survey of several thousand square degrees of the northern sky in 56 optical bands, 54 of them narrow-band filters (145 angstrom FWHM), contiguous and equi-spaced between 370 and 920nm, producing a low resolution photo-spectrum of every pixel of the observed sky, hence promising crucial breakthroughs in Cosmology and galaxy formation and evolution. JPCam has been designed to maximize field-of-view and wavelength coverage while guaranteeing a high image quality over the entire focal plane. To this aim, JPCam is equipped with a mosaic of 14 9.2k x 9.2k, 10 mu m pixel, low noise detectors from Teledyne-E2V, providing a FoV of 4.1 square degrees with a plate scale of 0.2267''/pix. In full frame mode, camera electronics allows read times of 10.9s at 633kHz read frequency (16.4s at 400kHz) with a readout noise of 5.5e(-) (4.3e(-)). Its filter unit admits 5 filter trays, each mounting 14 filters corresponding to the 14 CCDs of the mosaic and allowing all the J-PAS filters to be permanently installed. To fully optimize image quality, position of JST250 secondary mirror and JPCam focal plane are maintained optically aligned by means of two hexapod systems. To perform this task, JPCam includes 12 auxiliary detectors, 4 for autoguiding and 8 for image quality control through wavefront sensing.