Related papers: The Great Circle Camera: A New Drift Scanning Inst…
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…
A new application of a fast CCD drift scanning technique that allows us to perform speckle imaging of binary stars is presented. For each observation, an arbitrary number of speckle frames is periodically stored on a computer disk, each…
In this article, a new scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image composition technique is described, which can significantly reduce drift related image corruptions. Drift-distortion commonly causes blur and distortions in the SEM images.…
We have designed, constructed and put into operation a large area CCD camera that covers a large fraction of the image plane of the 1 meter Schmidt telescope at Llano del Hato in Venezuela. The camera consists of 16 CCD devices arranged in…
A CCD drift-scanning technique for lunar occultation (LO) observations is presented. While this approach has been addressed before by Sturmann (1994) for the case of large telescopes, the technical validity has never been discussed for…
The primary observational goals of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are to obtain CCD imaging of 10,000 deg^2 of the north Galactic cap in five passbands, with a limiting magnitude in the r-band of 22.5, to obtain spectroscopic redshifts of…
(Abridged) In the first part of this thesis, a general methodology for applying image deconvolution to wide-field CCD imagery. Results show that wavelet-based deconvolution can increase limiting magnitude up to 0.6 mag and improve limiting…
Ground-based mid-infrared (MIR) astronomical observations require the removal of the fast time variable components of (a) sky/background variation and (b) array background. Typically, this has been achieved through oscillating the…
We describe a procedure for background subtracting Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) imaging that improves the resulting detection and photometry of large galaxies on the sky. Within each SDSS drift scan run, we mask out detected sources and…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will carry out a digital photometric and spectroscopic survey over pi steradians in the northern Galactic cap. An array of CCD detectors used in drift-scan mode will image the sky in five passbands to a…
We summarize the plans for and the current status of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a digital imaging and spectroscopic survey of $\pi$ steradians in the northern Galactic cap. The CCD photometric survey will produce images in five bands to…
This paper proposes a non-computational method of counteracting the effect of image degradation introduced by the diffraction phenomenon in lensless microscopy. All the optical images (whether focused by lenses or not) are diffraction…
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…
In order to further develop and implement novel drift scan imaging experiments to undertake wide field, high time resolution surveys for millisecond optical transients, an appropriate telescope drive system is required. This paper describes…
Sky imaging systems use lenses to acquire images concentrating light beams in a sensor. The light beams received by the sky imager have an elevation angle with respect to the device normal. Thus, the pixels in the image contain information…
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 constructed a large format mosaic CCD camera for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The camera consists of two arrays, a photometric array which uses 30 2048 x 2048 SITe/Tektronix CCDs (24 micron pixels) with an effective imaging area of…
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…
In two-dimensional spectrographs, the optical distortions in the spatial and dispersion directions produce variations in the sub-pixel sampling of the background spectrum. Using knowledge of the camera distortions and the curvature of the…
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…