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The Subarcsecond Telescope And BaLloon Experiment, STABLE, is the fine stage of a guidance system for a high-altitude ballooning platform designed to demonstrate subarcsecond pointing stability, over one minute using relatively dim guide…
Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) have been successfully used in several low energy X-ray astronomical satellite over the past two decades. Their high energy resolution and high spatial resolution make them an perfect tool for low energy…
This work describes the design and implementation of optics for EXCLAIM, the EXperiment for Cryogenic Large-Aperture Intensity Mapping. EXCLAIM is a balloon-borne telescope that will measure integrated line emission from carbon monoxide…
Herein, we describe the design, implementation and operation principles of an astronomical camera system, based on a large-format CCD261-84 detector with an extremely thick 200 mkm substrate. The DINACON-V controller was used with the CCD…
Exoplanetary transit and stellar oscillation surveys require a very high precision photometry. The instrumental noise has therefore to be minimized. First, we perform a semi-analytical model of different noise sources. We show that the…
We have developed two redundant daytime star cameras to provide the fine pointing solution for the balloon-borne submillimeter telescope, BLAST. The cameras are capable of providing a reconstructed pointing solution with an absolute…
The 3.2 gigapixel LSST camera, an array of 189 thick fully-depleted CCDs, will repeatedly image the southern sky and accomplish a wide variety of science goals. However, its trove of tens of billions of object images implies stringent…
We have designed and built a new type of CCD that we call an orthogonal transfer CCD (OTCCD), which permits parallel clocking horizontally as well as vertically. The device has been used successfully to remove image motion caused by…
An attitude determination system for balloon-borne experiments is presented. The system provides pointing information in azimuth and elevation for instruments flying on stratospheric balloons over Antarctica. In-flight attitude is given by…
We have constructed and tested a 2d position sensitive parallel-plate gas ionization chamber with scanned charge transfer readout. The scan readout method described here is based on the development of a new position dependent charge…
We present the results of a study along with a first prototype of a high precision system (? 1 arcsec) for pointing and tracking light (near-infrared) telescopes on board stratospheric balloons. Such a system is essentially composed by a…
CMOS detectors offer many advantages over CCDs for optical and UV astronomical applications, especially in space where high radiation tolerance is required. However, astronomical instruments are most often designed for low light-level…
We report here the in orbit performance of the CCD camera (MAXI/SSC) onboard the International Space Station (ISS). It was commissioned in August, 2009. This is the first all-sky survey mission employing X-ray CCDs. It consists of 32 CCDs…
The Fine Pixel CCD (FPCCD) is one of the candidate sensor technologies for the ILC vertex detector. It will be located near interaction point and require high radiation tolerance. It will thus be operated at -40 degree C to improve…
Spider is a balloon-borne experiment that will measure the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background over a large fraction of a sky at 1 degree resolution. Six monochromatic refracting millimeter-wave telescopes with large arrays of…
This article describes the design features and the first test measurements obtained during the installation of a novel high resolution 2D neutron detection technique. The technique proposed in this work consists of a boron layer (enriched…
The EXperiment for Cryogenic Large-Aperture Intensity Mapping (EXCLAIM) is a balloon-borne telescope designed to survey star formation over cosmological time scales using intensity mapping in the 420 - 540 GHz frequency range. EXCLAIM uses…
We have developed a new method to correct dark current at relatively high temperatures for Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) images when dark frames cannot be obtained on the telescope. For images taken with the Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3)…
A charge-coupled device (CCD) is a standard imager in optical region in which the image quality is limited by its pixel size. CCDs also function in X-ray region but with substantial differences in performance. An optical photon generates…
We describe a camera beam simulator for the LSST which is capable of illuminating a 60mm field at f/1.2 with realistic astronomical scenes, enabling studies of CCD astrometric and photometric performance. The goal is to fully simulate LSST…