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Cosmic ray events

These are an important source of additional noise on a CCD. Cosmic rays which strike the detector produce bright and narrow noise spikes in the signal. The effect on the data depends exactly where on the detector the event occurs. The only way to deal with cosmic rays is to break long exposures into several shorter exposures. This has the major disadvantage of increasing the total readout noise.




Tue Aug 15 16:42:46 BST 1995