The Handbook of CCD Astronomy Book Review

The Handbook of CCD Astronomy sounds a perfect title for an amateur to learn everything about how to use my Meade CCD camera with my telescope. Thing is, this is no book for the amateur astronomer, but really for the research astronomers, academics and professionals.

The book begins by telling you everything about CCDs including the manufacturing process, the various types of CCDs and how they work. There are also some interesting sections on CCD pixel size, pixel binning as well as flat fielding. The book covers some very in-depth CCD topics such as how to calculate read noise and gain, and signal to noise ratio.

The book contains a great deal of graphs, diagrams and mathematical equations, well over my head as an amateur astronomer, but I did find some parts of the book good for explaining certain things such as how CCDs work and about flat fields.

The chapters in the book are titled CCD manufacturing and operation, Characterisation of Charge-Coupled Devices, CCD imaging, Photometry and astrometry, Spectroscopy with CCDs and CCDs used in space and at short wavelengths.

The Handbook of CCD Astronomy ends with a CCD reading list, CCD manufacturers list and some basics of image displays and colour images.

Handbook of CCD Astronomy is available at Waterstones