Instrumentation for a CCD Survey for White Dwarf Stars

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White dwarfs are the evolutionary end product of most kinds of stars, including the Sun. Studies of them are important not only from this standpoint but because they are well suited to determine the age of the disk of our Galaxy and also because they excite internal oscillations that can be used to probe their structures. The Principal Investigator (PI) wishes to upgrade a wide field camera he has built with a new large Charged Coupled Device detector that he has already constructed. This camera will be placed on the end of a small telescope and used by a Ph. D. candidate to survey the brightness of up to a million faint objects across the northern sky. This work will give a census of these objects and will improve our understanding of their distribution in luminosity in color, from which one can infer their ages. Thus, this work will provide many new white dwarf candidates for later study as well as lead to a refined determination of the disk of our Galaxy.