Wayne J. Cosshall wrote:
Ah, so you are a professional photographer. You should have said. I
almost went into astrophysics but went into computer science instead.

Cheers,

Wayne

Wayne J. Cosshall
Publisher, The Digital ImageMaker, http://www.dimagemaker.com/
Blog http://www.digitalimagemakerworld.com/
Publisher, Experimental Digital Photography
http://www.experimentaldigitalphotography.com
Personal art site http://www.cosshall.com/


I actually did partly work my way through college as a professional
photographer in an observatory, but with film and and a large darkroom.
I'll take digital any day. We closed all the darkrooms in our
observatory many years ago. I don't do much, if any, direct imaging, but
primarily spectroscopy, which is of course taking images of spectra. We
have our own CCD fabrication lab and are now working on a 4K x 4K device
with 15 micron pixels- it's big. We have made mosaics of 8 2K x 4K
devices that work very well (64 mp!), but each CCD cost around $100K.
Even the CCD controllers we build can cost upwards of $100K, but that's
part of the price of getting below 2 electrons read noise with a fast
read out. I say all this as background to how impressed I am by what you
can buy for a few hundred dollars. The technology in even an inexpensive
P&S still amazes me, maybe because I know how hard to do this stuff can
be. There's nothing like mass production to bring the cost down. Our
problem is that almost everything we build is a one-off. There are
probably less than 100 CCDs in the entire world, maybe less than 10,
that we would consider suitable for a recent instrument we delivered.

Joe