Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre: a dedicated facility for large sky surveys

The Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (OAJ) is an astronomical infrastructure conceived to carry out large sky, multi-filter astronomical surveys from the Northern hemisphere. It is fundamentally structured around two large field-of-view (FoV) telescopes and their corresponding panoramic instrumentation for direct imaging. OAJ main telescopes are the Javalambre Survey Telescope (JST/T250), a 2.55m telescope with a FoV of 3 deg diameter, and the Javalambre Auxiliary Survey Telescope (JAST/T80), a 0.83m telescope with a FoV of 2 deg diameter. Both telescopes are equipped with panoramic instrumentation designed to maximize their survey capabilities, namely JPAS-Pathfinder (interim) and JPCam for the JST/T250, and T80Cam for the JAST/T80. These are direct imaging instruments working in a fast converging beam at the telescopes Cassegrain foci that are based on state-of-the-art, high efficiency, low noise 9.2k-by-9.2k, 10μm pixel CCDs specially developed by e2v for the J-PAS project. In particular, JPCam, the main scientific instrument of the JST/T250 telescope, is equipped with a 1.2 Gpixel mosaic of 14 CCDs providing a useful FoV of 4.7 square degrees with a plate scale of 0.23 arcsec/pix. Moreover, JPCam includes 12 auxiliary detectors for auto-guiding and wave front sensing purposes. JPCam is completed with an innovative set of 59 optical filters specifically designed to perform accurate BAO measurements, main science driver of J-PAS. In this talk, the OAJ infrastructure, telescopes and instrumentation will be presented.