CCD Resources Jumpstation

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. I am employed by the Nordic Optical Telescope, I have no association with any other company or institute named in this list.

As time permits, I'll extend this page to include SWIR detector info. In the meantime, please send me any links you'd like to see here.

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.


Jump to:
  • Observatories & Universities
  • Commercial
  • Educational & PR
  • Miscellaneous
  • Local links
  • Data Reduction

  • Observatories and University departments:

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

    Nordic Optical Telescope -- The observatory's CCDs and detector development programme.

    The CFHT detector group

    ESO -- The European Southern Observatory's Optical Detector Team pages.

    Ohio State Imaging Sciences Lab. -- Information on various OSU instruments at MDM and elsewhere, info on how to use getters and get good vacuums.

    Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL), UCL, London -- CCDs for space missions.

    Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO) -- Instrument pages include some description of MIT/LL devices, including a Lumigen coated, thinned device and a deep depletion device.

    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.

    University of Arizona Imaging Technology Laboratory -- Mike Lesser's thinning lab. Look here for QE curves - modelled and real. A how-to on UV flooding too.

    IfA, Hawaii -- Gerry Luppino's gang.

    Cambridge, UK -- Paddy Oates is the CCD world's problem page agony aunt. These pages have gone, together with RGO, although Paddy did tell me they'd be moved elsewhere. As yet, I haven't found them, if anyone knows of their whereabouts, please let me know.

    San Diego, CA and Astronomical Reasearch Cameras, Inc. -- Bob Leach, Frank Beale & Co.'s ubiquitous cameras are documented here.

    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

    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:

    Chip Foundries:

    System and component providers



    Miscellaneous:

    The SDSU/ARC users group mailing list for users of Bob Leach's detector controller.

    CCD Astronomy Magazine (no longer published)

    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!)

    Sky Guide: Astrophotography -- A nice set of pages on astrophotography, mostly for amateurs.

    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 pulse-tube cryocoolers from a layman's intro to theoretical analyses.


    Educational and PR:

    A primer on CCDs from Simon Tulloch of ING, La Palma.
    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 has a number of PR and news items on CCDs. Try feeding "CCD" to their search engine.

    Local:

    These are a bit long in the tooth, but 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 (gzipped postscript), I wrote with Rein Warmels on the systematic, in situ testing of ESO, La Silla CCDs, and this is the poster (gzipped postscript) 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.