The third US Naval Observatory (USNO) CCD Astrograph Catalog, UCAC3 was released at the IAU General Assembly on 2009 August 10. It is a highly accurate, all-sky astrometric catalog of about 100 million stars in the R = 8 to 16 magnitude range. Recent epoch observations are based on over 270,000 CCD exposures, which have been re-processed for the UCAC3 release applying traditional and new techniques. Challenges in the data have been high dark current and asymmetric image profiles due to the poor charge transfer efficiency of the detector. Non-Gaussian image profile functions were explored and correlations are found for profile fit parameters with properties of the CCD frames. These were utilized to constrain the image profile fit models and adequately describe the observed point-spread function of stellar images with a minimum number of free parameters. Using an appropriate model function, blended images of double stars could be fit successfully. UCAC3 positions are derived from 2-dimensional image profile fits with a 5-parameter, symmetric Lorentz profile model. Internal precisions of about 5 mas per coordinate and single exposure are found, which are degraded by the atmosphere to about 10 mas. However, systematic errors exceeding 100 mas are present in the x,y-data which have been corrected in the astrometric reductions following the x,y-data reduction step described here.
We present evidence that spots imaged using astronomical CCDs do not exactly scale with flux: bright spots tend to be broader than faint ones, using the same illumination pattern. We measure that the linear size of spots or stars, of typical size 3 to 4 pixels FWHM, increase linearly with their flux by up to $2\%$ over the full CCD dynamic range. This brighter-fatter effect affects both deep-depleted and thinned CCD sensors. We propose that this effect is a direct consequence of the distortions of the drift electric field sourced by charges accumulated within the CCD during the exposure and ex…
A dedicated simulator, Poisson_CCD, has been constructed which models astronomical CCDs by solving Poisson's equation numerically and simulating charge transport within the CCD. The potentials and free carrier densities within the CCD are self-consistently solved for, giving realistic results for the charge distribution within the CCD storage wells. The simulator has been used to model the CCDs which are being used to construct the LSST digital camera. The simulator output has been validated by comparing its predictions with several different types of CCD measurements, including astrometric sh…
Space missions designed for high precision photometric monitoring of stars often under-sample the point-spread function, with much of the light landing within a single pixel. Missions like MOST, Kepler, BRITE, and TESS, do this to avoid uncertainties due to pixel-to-pixel response nonuniformity. This approach has worked remarkably well. However, individual pixels also exhibit response nonuniformity. Typically, pixels are most sensitive near their centers and less sensitive near the edges, with a difference in response of as much as 50%. The exact shape of this fall-off, and its dependence on t…
The ambitious goals of precision cosmology with wide-field optical surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) demand, as their foundation, precision CCD astronomy. This in turn requires an understanding of previously uncharacterized sources of systematic error in CCD sensors, many of which manifest themselves as static effective variations in pixel area. Such variation renders a critical assumption behind the traditional procedure of flat fielding--that a sensor's pixels comprise a uniform grid--invalid. In this work, we present a method to infe…
Gaia will only achieve its unprecedented measurement accuracy requirements with detailed calibration and correction for radiation damage. We present our Silvaco 3D engineering software model of the Gaia CCD pixel and two of its applications for Gaia: (1) physically interpreting supplementary buried channel (SBC) capacity measurements (pocket-pumping and first pixel response) in terms of e2v manufacturing doping alignment tolerances; and (2) deriving electron densities within a charge packet as a function of the number of constituent electrons and 3D position within the charge packet as input t…
The Gaia satellite is a high-precision astrometry, photometry and spectroscopic ESA cornerstone mission, currently scheduled for launch in 2012. Its primary science drivers are the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will achieve its unprecedented positional accuracy requirements with detailed calibration and correction for radiation damage. At L2, protons cause displacement damage in the silicon of CCDs. The resulting traps capture and emit electrons from passing charge packets in the CCD pixel, distorting the image PSF and biasing its centroid. Microscopic models of Gaia…
When Charge Coupled Devices are used for scientific observations, their dark signal is a hindrance. In their pristine state, most CCD pixels are `cool'; they exhibit low, quasi uniform dark current, which can be estimated and corrected for. In space, after having been hit by an energetic particle, pixels can turn `hot'. They start delivering excessive, less predictable, dark current. The hot pixels need therefore to be flagged so that subsequent analysis may ignore them. The image data of the PICARD SODISM solar telescope (Meftah et al. 2013) require dark signal correction and hot pixel identi…
The Digital Correlated Double Sampling (DCDS) is a technique based on multiple analog-to-digital conversions of every pixel when reading a CCD out. This technique allows to remove analog integrators, simplifying the readout electronics circuitry. In this work, a theoretical framework that computes the optimal weighted coefficients of the pixels samples, which minimize the readout noise measured at the CCD output is presented. By using a noise model for the CCD output amplifier where white and flicker noise are treated separately, the mathematical tool presented allows for the computation of th…
Intrapixel nonuniformity is known to exist in CCD and CMOS image sensors, though the effects in backside illuminated (BSI) CCDs are too small to be a concern for most astronomical observations. However, projects like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope require precise knowledge of the detector characteristics, and intrapixel effects may need more attention. By scanning CCD and CMOS cameras with a small light spot (unresolved by the optics), we find in the images that the spot's flux, centroid displacement, and ellipticity vary periodically on the pixel scale in most cases. The amplitude of var…
The Gaia satellite is a high-precision astrometry, photometry and spectroscopic ESA cornerstone mission, currently scheduled for launch in 2012. Its primary science drivers are the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will achieve its unprecedented accuracy requirements with detailed calibration and correction for CCD radiation damage and CCD geometric distortion. In this paper, the third of the series, we present our 3D Silvaco ATLAS model of the Gaia e2v CCD91-72 pixel. We publish e2v's design model predictions for the capacities of one of Gaia's pixel features, the suppl…
We present a solution to determine the actual or physical relative positions between CCD chips. Due to the limited depth of the Gaia catalogue, there may be few stars identified from the Gaia catalogue for astrometric calibration on the deep observation of a large, ground-based or space-based telescope, such as the planned two-metre Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST). For this reason, we referred to the idea from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) astrometry to only use stars' pixel positions to derive the relative positions between chips. We refer to the practice as differential astrometry …
The Photon Transfer Curve (PTC) of a CCD depicts the variance of uniform images as a function of their average. It is now well established that the variance is not proportional to the average, as Poisson statistics would indicate, but rather flattens out at high flux. This "variance deficit", related to the brighter-fatter effect, feeds correlations between nearby pixels, that increase with flux, and decay with distance. We propose an analytical expression for the PTC shape, and for the dependence of correlations with intensity, and relate both to some more basic quantities related to the elec…
We characterize the astrometric distortion at the edges of thick, fully-depleted CCDs in the lab using a bench-top simulation of LSST observing. By illuminating an array of forty thousand pinholes (30mu m diameter) at the object plane of a f/1.2 optical reimager, thousands of PSFs can be imaged over a 4Kx4K pixel CCD. Each high purity silicon pixel, 10mu m square by 100mu m deep, can then be individually characterized through a series of sub-pixel dithers in the X/Y plane. The unique character [response, position, shape] of each pixel as a function of flux, wavelength, back side bias, etc. can…
CCD sensors do not deliver a perfect image of the light they receive. Beyond the well known linear image smearing due to diffusion of charges during their drift towards the pixel wells, non-linear effects are at play in these sensors. We now have ample evidence for both a flux- dependent and static image distortions, especially but not only, on deep-depleted CCDs. For large surveys relying on CCD sensors, these effects should now be taken into account when reducing data. We present here a summary of current results on sensor characterization and mitigation methods.
Background. Astrometry at or below the micro-arcsec level with an imaging telescope assumes that the uncertainty on the location of an unresolved source can be an arbitrarily small fraction of the detector pixel, given a sufficient photon budget. Aim. This paper investigates the geometric limiting precision, in terms of CCD pixel fraction, achieved by a large set of star field images, selected among the publicly available science data of the TESS mission. Method. The statistics of the distance between selected bright stars ($G \simeq 5\,mag$), in pixel units, is evaluated, using the position e…
The Gaia mission has been designed to perform absolute astrometric measurements with unprecedented accuracy; the end-of-mission parallax standard error is required to be 30 micro-arcseconds for a G2V type star of magnitude 15. These requirements set a stringent constraint on the accuracy of the estimation of the location of the stellar image on the CCD for each observation: e.g., 0.3 milli-arseconds (mas) or 0.005 pixels for the same V=15 G2V star. However the Gaia CCDs will suffer from charge transfer inefficiency (CTI) caused by radiation damage that will degrade the stellar image quality an…
The European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia satellite has 106 CCD image sensors which will suffer from increased charge transfer inefficiency (CTI) as a result of radiation damage. To aid the mitigation at low signal levels, the CCD design includes Supplementary Buried Channels (SBCs, otherwise known as `notches') within each CCD column. We present the largest published sample of Gaia CCD SBC Full Well Capacity (FWC) laboratory measurements and simulations based on 13 devices. We find that Gaia CCDs manufactured post-2004 have SBCs with FWCs in the upper half of each CCD that are systematically small…
We have discovered an anomalous behavior of CCD readout electronics that affects their use in many astronomical applications. An offset in the digitization of the CCD output voltage that depends on the binary encoding of one pixel is added to pixels that are read out one, two and/or three pixels later. One result of this effect is the introduction of a differential offset in the background when comparing regions with and without flux from science targets. Conventional data reduction methods do not correct for this offset. We find this effect in 16 of 22 instruments investigated, covering a var…
In Charge Coupled Device (CCD) detectors the electrons excited upon absorption of a single x-ray photon quickly diffuse and generate charge-spots often larger than pixel dimensions. In the soft x-ray range this phenomenon drastically limits the effective spatial resolution to approximately 25μm, irrespective of the pixel size. For very low fluence the charge-cloud centroid determination can be used, on each individual spot, to estimate the actual photon impact position with sub-pixel precision. The readout noise and speed, together with the charge and spatial undersampling, are the main factor…
Theia is an astrometric mission proposed to ESA in 2014 for which one of the scientific objectives is detecting Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of nearby solar-type stars. This objective requires the capability to measure stellar centroids at the precision of 1e-5 pixel. Current state-of-the-art methods for centroid estimation have reached a precision of about 3e-5 pixel at two times Nyquist sampling, this was shown at the JPL by the VESTA experiment. A metrology system was used to calibrate intra and inter pixel quantum efficiency variations in order to correct pixelation errors. …
We have developed a non-destructive readout system that uses a floating-gate amplifier on a thick, fully depleted charge coupled device (CCD) to achieve ultra-low readout noise of 0.068 e- rms/pix. This is the first time that discrete sub-electron readout noise has been achieved reproducibly over millions of pixels on a stable, large-area detector. This allows the precise counting of the number of electrons in each pixel, ranging from pixels with 0 electrons to more than 1500 electrons. The resulting CCD detector is thus an ultra-sensitive calorimeter. It is also capable of counting single pho…
Flat-field images with thick, fully-depleted CCDs exhibit response variations near the edges of the chip and at other locations, such as the regoins bordering mid-frame blooming stop implants. Two possible origins for these repsonse variations have been suggested: either photometric response (quantum efficiency) or effective pixel area is modified in these regions. In the latter case source position and shape distortions would be expected in these regions, with consequent impact on astrometric and weak lensing measurements. As an experimental check to distinguish between the two effects and to…
NEAT is an astrometric mission proposed to ESA with the objectives of detecting Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of nearby solar-type stars. NEAT requires the capability to measure stellar centroids at the precision of 5e-6 pixel. Current state-of-the-art methods for centroid estimation have reached a precision of about 2e-5 pixel at two times Nyquist sampling, this was shown at the JPL by the VESTA experiment. A metrology system was used to calibrate intra and inter pixel quantum efficiency variations in order to correct pixelation errors. The European part of the NEAT consortium i…
The 80-cm azimuthal telescope is newly mounted at Yaoan Station, Purple Mountain Observatory in 2018. The astrometric performance of the telescope is tested in the following three aspects. (a) The geometric distortion of its CCD attached. It is stable in both a single epoch and multi epochs. Eight distortion solutions are derived over about one year. The maximum values range from 0.75 to 0.79 pixel and the median values range from 0.14 to 0.16 pixel. (b) The limit magnitude of stars. About 20.5 magnitude (Gaia-G) stars can be detected with Johnson-V filter exposured in 300 seconds. The astrome…
Image compression has been a frequent topic of presentations at ADASS. Compression is often viewed as just a technique to fit more data into a smaller space. Rather, the packing of data - its "density" - affects every facet of local data handling, long distance data transport, and the end-to-end throughput of workflows. In short, compression is one aspect of proper data structuring. For example, with FITS tile compression the efficient representation of data is combined with an expressive logistical paradigm for its manipulation. A deeper question remains. Not just how best to represent the da…
We present a new automatic tool for time-domain astronomy - the Cambridge Photometric Calibration Server 2.0 - developed under OPTICON H2020 programme. It has been designed to respond to the need of automated rapid photometric data calibration and dissemination for transient events, primarily from Gaia space mission. CPCS has been in operation since 2013 and has been used to calibrate around 130 000 observations of hundreds of transients. We present the status of this tool's development and demonstrate improvements made in the second version. The tests present the ability to combine CCD imagin…
We have developed a simulation-based method of spectral analysis for pile-up affected data of X-ray CCDs without any loss of photon statistics. As effects of the photon pile-up appear as complicated nonlinear detector responses, we employ a detailed simulation to calculate the important processes in an X-ray observation including physical interactions, detector signal generation, detector readout, and a series of data reduction processes. This simulation naturally reproduces X-ray-like and background-like events as results of X-ray photon merging in a single pixel or in a chunk of adjacent pix…
PLATO has been selected and adopted by ESA as the third medium-class Mission (M3) of the Cosmic Vision Program, to be launched in 2026 with a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from the French Guiana. Its Payload is based on a suite of 26 telescopes and cameras in order to discover and characterise, thanks to ultra-high accurate photometry and the transits method, new exoplanets down to the range of Earth analogues. Each camera is composed of 4 CCDs working in full frame or frame-transfer mode. 24 cameras out of 26 host 4510 by 4510 pixels CCDs, operated in full-frame mode with a pixel depth of 16 bits and a…
Over 3 billion astronomical objects have been detected in the more than 22 million orthogonal transfer CCD images obtained as part of the Pan-STARRS1 $3π$ survey. Over 85 billion instances of those objects have been automatically detected and characterized by the Pan-STARRS Image Processing Pipeline photometry software, psphot. This fast, automatic, and reliable software was developed for the Pan-STARRS project, but is easily adaptable to images from other telescopes. We describe the analysis of the astronomical objects by psphot in general as well as for the specific case of the 3rd processin…
Precise centroid estimation plays a critical role in accurate astrometry using telescope images. Conventional centroid estimation fits a template point spread function (PSF) to the image data. Because the PSF is typically not known to high accuracy due to wavefront aberrations and uncertainties in optical system, a simple Gaussian function is commonly used. PSF knowledge error leads to systematic errors in the conventional centroid estimation. In this paper, we present an accurate centroid estimation algorithm by reconstructing the PSF from well sampled (above Nyquist frequency) pixelated imag…
The European Space Agency's Gaia mission is scheduled for launch in 2013. It will operate at L2 for 5 years, rotating slowly to scan the sky so that its two optical telescopes will repeatedly observe more than one billion stars. The resulting data set will be iteratively reduced to solve for the position, parallax and proper motion of every observed star. The focal plane contains 106 large area silicon CCDs continuously operating in a mode where the line transfer rate and the satellite rotation are in synchronisation. One of the greatest challenges facing the mission is radiation damage to the…
In many applications, such as development and testing of image processing algorithms, it is often necessary to simulate images containing realistic noise from solid-state photosensors. A high-level model of CCD and CMOS photosensors based on a literature review is formulated in this paper. The model includes photo-response non-uniformity, photon shot noise, dark current Fixed Pattern Noise, dark current shot noise, offset Fixed Pattern Noise, source follower noise, sense node reset noise, and quantisation noise. The model also includes voltage-to-voltage, voltage-to-electrons, and analogue-to-…
Astronomical photometry is the science of measuring the flux of a celestial object. Since its introduction, the CCD has been the principle method of measuring flux to calculate the apparent magnitude of an object. Each CCD image taken must go through a process of cleaning and calibration prior to its use. As the number of research telescopes increases the overall computing resources required for image processing also increases. Existing processing techniques are primarily sequential in nature, requiring increasingly powerful servers, faster disks and faster networks to process data. Existing H…
Charge Transfer Inefficiency (CTI) due to radiation damage above the Earth's atmosphere creates spurious trailing in Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images. Radiation damage also creates unrelated warm pixels - but these happen to be perfect for measuring CTI. We model CTI in the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS)/Wide Field Channel (WFC) and construct a physically motivated correction scheme. This operates on raw data, rather than secondary science products, by returning individual electrons to pixels from which they were unintentionally dragged during readout. We apply our correction to images f…
