CCDs are the same type of sensor used on digital cameras, so it's worth protecting.
The company has worked solidly for more than five years to produce all Gaia's CCDs.
CCDs would register objects in the range of 1 to 500 lux, above which they'd wash out.
CCDs were invented, like so many digital age breakthroughs, at Bell Labs, now part of Lucent Technologies.
Then in the early 1990s cameras built on charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, became available to amateur astronomers.
Back then, the thought was for a huge satellite carrying two camera arrays incorporating some 500 CCDs.
CCDs are much more efficient at imaging very faint objects and are far less likely to be foiled by Earth-based light.
But by now, no one should really expect the small CCDs found in these compact shooters to perform any differently, right?
That means CCDs can't take advantage of the same economies of scale that have continually reduced the cost of memory chips and microprocessors.
Traditional cameras use either charge-coupled devices (CCDs) or complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) chips, which capture images on a grid of millions of pixels.
CCDs convert starlight gathered by the telescope into electrical signals.
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The idea is that Gaia's two telescopes will focus the stars on to the end of the array, and as these celestial objects then scan across the CCDs their positions and individual properties will be logged.
Take, for instance, charge coupled devices (CCDs).
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Aside from the differences in lens size, these bad boys are all pretty much the same, hitting the ground with 12 megapixel CCDs, 2.7-inch displays, advanced face tracking, intelligent auto mode, and both xD-Picture Card and microSD compatibility.
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And because Gaia will track anything that passes across its e2v CCDs, it is likely also to see countless objects that have hitherto gone unrecorded - such as asteroids, planets beyond our Solar System, and tepid stars that never quite fired into life.
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