The Simons Observatory (SO) is a cosmic microwave background experiment composed of three 0.42 m Small Aperture Telescopes (SATs) and one 6 m Large Aperture Telescope (LAT) in the Atacama Desert of Chile. The Large Aperture Telescope Receiver (LATR) was integrated into the LAT in August 2023; however, because mirrors were not yet installed, the LATR optical chain was capped at the 4K stage. In this dark configuration we are able to characterize many elements of the instrument without contributions from atmospheric noise. Here we show this noise is below the required upper limit and its features are well described with a simple noise model. Maps produced using this noise model have properties that are in good agreement with the white noise levels of our dark data. Additionally, we show that our nominal scan strategy has a minimal effect on the noise when compared to the noise when the telescope is stationary
@article{arxiv.2407.09669,
title = {The Simons Observatory: Dark Characterization of the Large Aperture Telescope},
author = {Saianeesh K. Haridas and Zeeshan Ahmed and Tanay Bhandarkar and Mark Devlin and Simon Dicker and Shannon M. Duff and Daniel Dutcher and Kathleen Harrington and Shawn W. Henderson and Johannes Hubmayr and Bradley R. Johnson and Anna Kofman and Alex Manduca and Michael D. Niemack and Michael J. Randall and Thomas P. Satterthwaite and John Orlowski-Scherer and Benjamin L. Schmitt and Carlos Sierra and Max Silva-Feaver and Robert J. Thornton and Yuhan Wang and Kaiwen Zheng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.09669},
year = {2024}
}