BEAVERTON, OR.- October 30, 1995- Scientific Imaging Technologies, Inc. (SITe) of Beaverton, Oregon, has been selected by the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC) to supply the CCDs for a $20 million, two-and-a-half meter telescope designed to map the entire Northern Hemisphere. Known formally as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Program, this telescope will be used to complete the first survey of the Northern Hemisphere since the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey in the late 1930's.

"The CCD technology SITe has developed delivers a tremendous boost to space research. It significantly broadens what we can record and provides a view to the galaxy that is 10,000 times deeper than the Palomar survey." said Dr. Don York of the University of Chicago, director of the Sloan survey program. "The one-meter camera inside the Sloan Telescope will contain 54 custom CCDs, enabling us to identify and record one hundred million objects by the beginning of the 21st century," he added.

CCDs, or charge-coupled devices, are microchips that can turn light into a stream of digital data, or electronic signals, that can be recorded, altered and displayed on a computer monitor or even a television screen. CCD technology has played a key role in scientific and medical inventions, including the Hubble Telescope and digital spot mammography.

Twenty years of research and development in CCD technology will allow for a survey that will map one quarter of the celestial sphere with all resulting data being usable again and again by amateur and professional astronomers.

The information recorded in the Sloan telescope's cameras will be directly downloaded into a custom-built computer system operated by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermi Lab). Once the survey has been completed, this information will be transferred to a more widely usable medium, such as CD-ROM, that will be fully accessible by the public.

The Sloan Telescope, scheduled for completion in nine months, is being built and installed at the Apache Point Laboratory in New Mexico. Members from the ARC consortium developing this telescope include the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, Princeton University, John Hopkins University and the Institute for Advanced Studies, an independent scientific institute located in Princeton, N.J. The ARC consortium has been working in collaboration with Fermi Lab, the U.S. Naval Observatory and the Japan Promotional Group. Additional grants and resources have been provided by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation.

Scientific Imaging Technologies is an industry leader in the research, design and manufacture of charge-coupled devices (CCDs)) and imaging assemblies containing CCD components targeted for both scientific grade and commercial applications.