Related papers: Spot Scan Probe of Lateral Field Effects in a Thic…
We characterize the astrometric distortion at the edges of thick, fully-depleted CCDs in the lab using a bench-top simulation of LSST observing. By illuminating an array of forty thousand pinholes (30mu m diameter) at the object plane of a…
Upcoming and current large astronomical survey experiments often seek to constrain cosmological parameters via measurements of subtle effects such as weak lensing, which can only be measured statistically. In these cases, instrumental…
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera (LSSTCam) pixel response has been characterized using laboratory measurements with a grid of artificial stars. We quantify the contributions to photometry, centroid, point-spread function size,…
We present evidence that spots imaged using astronomical CCDs do not exactly scale with flux: bright spots tend to be broader than faint ones, using the same illumination pattern. We measure that the linear size of spots or stars, of…
CCD sensors do not deliver a perfect image of the light they receive. Beyond the well known linear image smearing due to diffusion of charges during their drift towards the pixel wells, non-linear effects are at play in these sensors. We…
This paper summarizes the introductory presentation for a workshop that explored the challenges of making precision astronomical measurements using deeply depleted (thick) CCDs. While thick CCDs provide definite advantages in terms of…
We present a means of characterizing and removing internal reflections between the CCD and other optical surfaces in an astronomical camera. The stellar reflections appear as out-of-focus images and are not necessarily axisymmetric about…
Photo-generated charge in thick, back-illuminated, fully-depleted CCDs is transported by electric fields from the silicon substrate to the collecting well at the front gate of the CCDs. However, electric fields transverse to the surface of…
Thick back-illuminated deep-depletion CCDs have superior quantum efficiency over previous generations of thinned and traditional thick CCDs. As a result, they are being used for wide-field imaging cameras in several major projects. We use…
We have discovered an anomalous behavior of CCD readout electronics that affects their use in many astronomical applications. An offset in the digitization of the CCD output voltage that depends on the binary encoding of one pixel is added…
Image distortion due to weak gravitational lensing is examined using a non-perturbative method of integrating the geodesic deviation and optical scalar equations along the null geodesics connecting the observer to a distant source. The…
In this work we present simple, physics-based models for two effects that have been noted in the fully depleted CCDs that are presently used in the Dark Energy Survey Camera. The first effect is the observation that the point-spread…
Intrapixel nonuniformity is known to exist in CCD and CMOS image sensors, though the effects in backside illuminated (BSI) CCDs are too small to be a concern for most astronomical observations. However, projects like the Large Synoptic…
The brighter-fatter effect affects all CCD sensors to various degrees. Deep-depleted thick sensors are seriously affected and the measurement of galaxy shapes for cosmic shear measurements requires an accurate correction of the effect in…
The tilt, rotation, or offset of each CCD with respect to the focal plane, as well as the distortion of the focal plane itself, cause shape distortions to the observed objects, an effect typically known as field distortion (FD). We point…
Images obtained by drift-scanning with a stationary telescope are affected by the declination-dependent curvature of star trails. The image displacement to curvature and drift rate variation increases with the angular field of view and can…
Thick fully depleted CCDs, while enabling wide spectral response, also present challenges in understanding the systematic errors due to 3D charge transport. This 2014 Workshop on Precision Astronomy with Fully Depleted CCDs covered progress…
The ambitious goals of precision cosmology with wide-field optical surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) demand, as their foundation, precision CCD astronomy. This in turn requires an…
Reduction of images and science analysis from ground-based telescopes such as the LSST requires detailed knowledge of the PSF of the image, which includes components attributable to the instrument as well as components attributable to the…
Charge-coupled devices (CCDs) are widely used in astronomy to carry out a variety of measurements, such as for flux or shape of astrophysical objects. The data reduction procedures almost always assume that ther esponse of a given pixel to…