*note* - this page is Still! Under Construction; 9/10/2004
We have recently installed a new visible light CCD camera made by Apogee Instruments that is to be used on the Thirty Inch Telescope at the University of California at Berkeley Astronomy Department's Leuschner Observatory.This instrument is used primarily for the Astronomy 120 laboratory class. It saw the ring nebula (to the right!) during one of it's first sky views, on September 9th, 2003.
Our new CCD is made by Apogee Instruments, and is a 1024x1024 array of 13 micron square sized pixels. It utilizes a back illuminated, high QE chip made by Marconi. It has a computer controlled forced air cooling system, to bring the chip temperature down to a minimum of -40 degrees Celsius.
Full specifications can be found here: Apogee CCD specs
The new CCD system includes some great new imaging software; all references on these web pages to 'qimage' do not apply to the Apogee CCD (but do apply to the Infrared CCD, ircam.)
If you need to use the Apogee CCD standalone in the 705 lab, you will find details for that, here. For all the details on the included software, *to operate the CCD*, go here: Apogee Linux-driven User Guide
And for details on *image processing* capabilities of the software, go here: DS9 Image Processing capabilities