MISAO Project

Home Page       Sat Aug 16 13:20:21 JST 1997

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Next: Automated search Up: Global Database of Patrol Previous: Discovery of new objects

Cooled CCD camera

Only a few years ago, new objects search mainly consists of visual search and photo search. The visual search's advantage is its promptness. But the way can catch only bright objects and furthermore it should cause many misses. On the other hand, the photo search can find out faint objects. But the way costs much on time to take, develop and compare each picture.

However, the appearance of practical CCD cameras changes the situation completely. A CCD camera's sensitivity is several dozens times of that of a picture, and only one minute exposure is enough to catch stars. In addition, it can detect slight difference of brightness and the limit of magnitude improves several mags. Because CCD images do not bend as pictures, the positional precision is extreme high. Furthermore the result image of the stars' light is obtained as a digital data linearly. So it is easy to use for data processing with computers.

I mean, practical CCD cameras enables for anyone to take stars images easily. Therefore those images should be being produced on and on. But actually, most of them do not appear in the public, except for some printed on magazines or WWW sites. However, as I mentioned above, those unused images contains data as informative as pictures taken at a large observatory in the past. The global database can use those sleeping images.

Copyright(C) Seiichi Yoshida (comet@aerith.net). All rights reserved.