CCD Resources

This page provides a jumpstation for a variety of web resources appropriate to the development and use of CCDs in professional astronomy. I make occasional searches of the web in an attempt to keep it complete and up to date.

If you have a link you would like me to add to this page, please let me know

These links are listed in no particular order.

Observatories and University departments:

The CFHT detector group pages, and a prescription for in-situ testing

ESO -- ESO's Optical Detector Team pages.

UCO/Lick, Santa Cruz -- Richard Stover & Co. have some interesting stuff on Orbit CCDs, including a 2Kx4K device.

NAO, Japan: CCDs for Subaru - comparison of several different brands of 2kx4k CCDs, including EEV, SITe, MIT and Hamamatsu.

Berkeley Lab - UCO/Lick - High-resistivity CCD colaboration documents.

Steward Observatory -- Mike Lesser's thinning lab. Look here for QE curves - modelled and real. A how-to on UV flooding too. The new page, still under development, is here

IfA, Hawaii -- Gerry Luppino's gang. (Gerry makes purple dewars).

Cambridge, UK -- Paddy Oates is the CCD world's problem page agony aunt.

San Diego, CA -- Bob Leach & Co. are well organised, with an online manual for the SDSU CCD controller and in-depth information on a couple of Loral devices.

Sternwarte der Universität Bonn -- Ralph Kohley's info on CTE measurement, pocket-pumping and anti-blooming clocking.

Mount Stromlo and Siding Springs -- Bill Roberts describes the MSSSO CCD user interface

CTIO -- Alistair Walker maintains the Tololo CCD pages, and there's a pointer to info on the Arcon controller.

Catania Observatory -- Giovanni Bonanno's lab has a comprehensive description of their operation.

The University of Oregon, Dept. of Physics provides a basic CCD Q & A page.

Maki Sekiguchi's Sloane Digital Sky Survey imaging camera database

The guys at the Danish IJAF have a bunch of CCDs and some info on MTF measurement and washing CCDs.

The delta-doped CCD from Shouleh Nikzad at JPL

Observatoire Haute-Provence offers some info on an EEV 42-20 CCD

Commercial sites:

SITe -- a commercial CCD foundry and provider (detectors, other useful information).

EEV -- a commercial CCD foundry and provider (Detectors, cameras).

PixelVision -- a commercial CCD imaging system provider (includes some useful notes and tutorials).

Thomson CSF -- a commercial CCD provider (product list).

Spectral Instruments in Tucson make high end, turnkey systems, up to 16 bits/pixel and LN2 or closed-cycle dewars.

SBIG and AstroCam make commercial CCD systems.

CCD Astronomy Magazine (no longer published)

Apogee Instruments make a high-end, off-the-shelf system and offer the "CCD University" with some introductory on-line tutorials about CCD technology.

Photometrics make high-end CCD camera systems.

Philips make CCDs up to 7kx9k pixels.

Proscan elektronische Systeme GmbH also produce slow-scan cameras, using Thomson CSF CCDs with up to 2048x2048 pixels, 5 MHz readout rate and 12 bits deep. (2 MHz at 14 bits).

Andor Technology offer a selection of TE-cooled cameras.

Hamamatsu detectors and cameras

Starlight Xpress -- turnkey slowscan systems & software

Miscellaneous:

John McDonald offers another page of CCD links

Bonner Denton's page is curiously short of content on the subject of his favourite hobby (screaming across the desert in cars that do passable impressions of airplanes without wings, jet airplanes), but he does have a list of CCD resources

The Cookbook Camera Home Page tells you what some of the more advanced amateurs are up to these days. (They're catching up guys!)

Tybee Evans offers a long list of links and information, mostly for amateurs, but plenty of useful stuff for the professional.

GSFC Materials engineering has a bunch of information on vacuum outgassing of various materials.

NASA Ames CryoGroup for everything on snazzy new pusle-tube cryocoolers from a layman's intro to theoretical analyses.

Educational and PR:

A CCD laboratory class from Robert Mutel at The University of Iowa
A CCD laboratory class from Peter McCullough at The University of Illinois
More on CCDs at Oregon
Apogee's "CCD University"
Some brief notes from the Virginia Military Institute
Lucent's article documenting the invention of CCDs, includes background on Tony Tyson and the big throughput camera.

Local:

The CFHT detectors page and the CFHT homepage are the first ports of call for everything you wanted to know about CFHT.

You might find my CCD testing cookbook useful. A postscript version is available (caveat: it's still evolving; this version is not site-specific). Here is the ADASS III paper (0.5 Mbyte postscript file), I wrote with Rein Warmels on the systematic, in situ testing of ESO, La Silla CCDs, and this is the poster (0.6 Mbyte postscript file) that we presented at the actual meeting (well, Rein did; I didn't go -- busy, busy, busy...).

Data Reduction

I reduce much of my CCD time series stuff with Stellar Photometry Software by Jim Heasley and Ken Janes. (This page appears to have evaporated.)

I also use IDL for general purpose data reduction and analysis.

And I mustn't forget IRAF, which is a data reduction package specifically for reducing Astronomical data (everyone uses it.

ESO has a page of data reduction and analysis tools, including MIDAS, Eclipse and Skycat.