S90_101a INSTRUMENTATION PROJECT MILESTONE: FIRST ALIGNMENT IMAGE
After two months of research in summer 2012 to find the best CCD and analog processing pipeline within the Canon small-format CCD camera line, and then the discovery of CHDK followed by a year of development along with the dedicated and talented folks on this forum, the S90_101a imager has been successfully installed today in its instrument replacing its old S50, and is now fully functional and aligned. This is its first 10 Mpx image.
These figures demonstrate a fiber-generated alignment spot that allows centering of the CCD in the instrument.
Figure 1. CHDKPTP high-resolution liveview (Viewfinder 1:1). Here, the CCD (opt: 16C) is being cooled to +16C (until a hermetically-sealed CCD enclosure is machined where we should be able to go to -20C). You can see the alignment spot centered in the cross hair.
Figure 2. JPG from the S90_101a imager. Central zone of the image is zoomed to 100%. Thus surface sampling is ~91 nanometers/pixel in the specimen plane, making this spot diameter 5.0 microns. The CCD is centered to an accuracy of +/- 50 nanometers of dead-center. Even a defect in the fiber can be seen: at ~2:30 o'clock, there is a slight flattening of its circumference, ~1/4 micron out-of-round.
The multi-megadollar combined R&D resources of Canon, Sony, and Analog Devices, together with the power of CHDK and its customizable adaptability has made all this possible. At the time of this writing, there is no other equivalent system that achieves this high level of performance required for scientific instrumentation from a small-format CCD, even from Roper or Andor.