Background Information - Telescope Image Data


CCD Camera

CCD Microchip

The Liverpool Telescope uses a special type of camera to photograph the night sky.

Light gathered by the telescope falls into tiny buckets or pixels on a micro-chip the size of a postage stamp (see right).

These micro-chips are called Charged Coupled Devices or CCDs, and can cost many thousands of pounds to produce.

The CCD on the Liverpool Telescope contains over 4 million pixels.

The information collected by CCDs is then sent to computers as data files, and special image processing software can be used to re-create and analyse the image seen by the telescope.

The image processing software you will use is called LTImage.


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