Highland Road Park Observatory

THE CHARGE COUPLED DEVICE (CCD) CAMERA

A CCD is a light sensitive silicon solid state device composed of many small pixels. The light falling on a pixel is converted into a charge pulse which is then measured by the CCD electronics and represented by a number. The number usually ranges from 0 (no light) to 65,535 (very intense light).

A digital image is the collection of such light intensity numbers for all of the pixels from the CCD. A computer can reconstruct the image by varying the light intensity for each spot on the computer monitor in the proper order. Such digital images can be stored on disk, transmitted over a computer network and analyzed using very powerful image processing techniques.

Thanks to Photometric, Inc. for the use of the images on this page.

Last updated by Frederick J. Barnett on Thursday, January 20, 2005 12:27:24 PM