Scanner parts as astrocameras?

A few years back, a few experimenters used the sensors from scanners to
make linear cameras. Some of them made very nice panoramic cameras when
coupled with a lens and motor drive.

Has anyone tried to use scanner elements to make a linear camera for,
say spectroscopy, or a streak camera, on telescopes? Just curious.

Henry Barwood

Originally Posted by

A few years back, a few experimenters used the sensors from scanners to
make linear cameras. Some of them made very nice panoramic cameras when
coupled with a lens and motor drive.

Has anyone tried to use scanner elements to make a linear camera for,
say spectroscopy, or a streak camera, on telescopes? Just curious.

Henry Barwood

I think a French amateur used one in a solar spectroscope scanning the sun's H-alpha line to create a H-alphagram as the sun's disk drifted across the slit [pixel array] in 2 minutes. I thought about it but bottled-out and bought a Coronado PST;-). I had earlier built a spectrohelioscope as http://www.astroman.fsnet.co.uk/needle1.htm

Nytecam

wrote:

A few years back, a few experimenters used the sensors from scanners to
make linear cameras. Some of them made very nice panoramic cameras when
coupled with a lens and motor drive.

Has anyone tried to use scanner elements to make a linear camera for,
say spectroscopy, or a streak camera, on telescopes? Just curious.

Way back in 1994, Tom Droege, an engineer at Fermilab, cooked
up an astronomical camera based on a 1-D scanning array detector.
You can read about it and see an example image at

http://stupendous.rit.edu/tass/tass_more.html#marki

He went on to make more sophisticated devices based on
2-D CCD chips, too ....

http://stupendous.rit.edu/tass/tass.shtml

Michael Richmond

Interesting, but wow, talk about obsolete technology. I suspect that
many things could be done with modern scanners, if I just knew a bit
about how to control the arrays. Alas, I'm no programmer (!).

Henry

I hadn't even thought about a "self-scanning" image designed around a
spectrograph and slit arrangement. Is there a more detailed discussion
of the technique (in English?).

I like the needle slit technique!

Thanks for responding.

Henry