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Electronic Optical Sky Surveys

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2016

T.A. McKay
T.A. McKay*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan Department of Physics

Extract

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The introduction of of Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) in the middle 1970s provided astronomy with nearly perfect (linear, high-sensitivity, low-noise, high dynamic-range, digital) optical detectors. Unfortunately, restrictions imposed by CCD production and cost has typically limited their use to observations of relatively small fields. Recently a combination of technical advances have made practical the application of CCDs to survey science. CCD mosaic cameras, which help overcome the size restrictions imposed by CCD manufacture, allow electronic access to a larger fraction of the available focal plane. Multi-fiber spectrographs, which couple the low-noise, high QE performance of CCDs with the ability to observe spectra for many objects at once, have improved the spectroscopic efficiency of telescopes by factors approaching half a million. An improved understanding of image distortion gives us telescopes on which we expect sub-arcsecond images a large fraction of the time. Finally, and perhaps most important, the performance of computer hardware continues to advance, to the point where analysis of multi-terabyte datasets, while still daunting, is at least conceivable.

Type
Part 1. General Sky Survey Reviews
Information
Symposium - International Astronomical Union , Volume 179: New Horizons from Multi-Wavelength Sky Surveys , 1998 , pp. 49 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Kluwer 1998 

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