Question

7. An optical telescope has a 51-cm diameter primary mirror and a focal ratio of 6.8. It is equipped with a CCD camera with a pixel size of 9 micron and 4 million pixels (in a square array). Calculate the plate scale (i.e., pixel size in arcsec) and the field of view of the camera (in arcmin). Compare the former with the typical seeing-dominated spatial resolution (2 arcsec) and compare the latter with the size of the spiral galaxy M33. Is the pixel size small enough to sample the seeing resolution sufficiently? Is the field of view large enough to capture M33 in one image?

Answer 1