Characterization of a commercial, front-illuminated interline transfer CCD camera for use as a guide camera on a balloon-borne telescope

摘要

We report results obtained during the characterization of a commercialfront-illuminated progressive scan interline transfer CCD camera. Wedemonstrate that the unmodified camera operates successfully in temperature andpressure conditions (-40C, 4mBar) representative of a high altitude balloonmission. We further demonstrate that the centroid of a well-sampled star can bedetermined to better than 2% of a pixel, even though the CCD is equipped with amicrolens array. This device has been selected for use in a closed-loopstar-guiding and tip-tilt correction system in the BIT-STABLE balloon mission.