Some examples of CCD cameras

In the past decade, as CCDs have found their way into consumer eletronics, the price of good astronomical cameras has dropped. You can now purchase a unit which will permit you (and your students) to perform real scientific projects -- and take pretty pictures -- for the price of a new computer, or less.

• Santa Barbara Instruments Group , or SBIG for short, sells cameras to amateurs and professionals.
  • The SBIG model ST-8 is a cooled camera with 1530x1020 pixels, plus a second, smaller CCD for guiding built into the dewar. The going price (in June, 2004) is about $6000.
  • The SBIG model ST-7 is also cooled and also has 2 chips (one for guiding), but includes a smaller CCD chip (765x510 pixels). It goes for about $1500.
  • SBIG also makes a video camera, the STV . This cooled CCD video camera can take long or short exposures, and can be used as a guider or as the main instrument. It costs around $2000.

• Webcams with CCD detectors have become very popular lately, as they permit one to acquire many images in a short period of time. There are free several software packages which allow one to post-process such images to produce very sharp images of the planets.
  • The Phillips ToUCam is one of the most popular cameras. You can purchase the camera and a telescope adapter for $170.
  • By default, the ToUCam's maximum exposure time is only But there are instructions for modifying a ToUCam so that it can take exposures of many seconds.

• Of course, there are bigger and more expensive cameras for people with deep pockets.

  • The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS for short) has a camera with 54 CCD chips!
    • the design
    • the finished product
    • Some examples of SDSS images

  • CFH12K is a mosiac of 12 chips, each 2048x4096. It sits on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Mauna Kea and provides a field of 42 x 28 arcminutes.
    • it can take a picture of the entire Moon at once ...

  • Suprime-Cam, an array of 5x2 CCD chips on the Suburu 8-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, provides a field
    • basic information on Suprime-Cam
    • Notice how much of the Andromeda Galaxy fits into one image

If you want to figure out exactly how big the field of view will be for some particular camera on your telescope, try

Ron Wodaski's Magic CCD Calculator

Copyright © Michael Richmond. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.