Stellar Occultations in the 1990s: Portable, High-Speed, CCD Photometers

这笔奖金将用于麻省理工学院开发基于电荷耦合器件（CCD）的新一代光度计，用于观测太阳系天体对恒星的掩星。与使用光电倍增管的传统高速光度计相比，基于CCD的光度计在更宽的波长范围内提供了更高的量子效率，能够直接从CCD图像引导望远镜，并且能够构建一个更小的合成光度孔径，跟踪图像运动，并可以根据变化的视觉条件进行优化。因此，基于ccd的光度计在给定的事件中提供了比传统光度计更大的信噪比，并且它允许对涉及较暗恒星的更多事件进行有用的观测。高速CCD光度计必须是便携式的，以便与便携式望远镜或恰好位于掩星路径内的固定望远镜一起使用。

This award will be used at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop a new generation of photometers based on Charge Coupled Devices (CCD) for use in observing occultations of stars by objects in the Solar System. When compared with conventional high-speed photometers that use photomultipliers, a CCD-based photometer provides much greater quantum efficiency over a broader wavelength range, the ability to guide the telescope directly from the CCD image, and the ability to construct a much smaller synthetic photometric aperture after the fact that tracks image motion and can be optimized for changing seeing conditions. As a result, the CCD-based photometer provides a substantially greater signal-to-noise ratio than the traditional photometer for a given event, and it allows useful observations of the more numerous events involving fainter stars to be made. The high-speed CCD photometer must be portable in order to be used with a portable telescope or a fixed telescope that happens to lie within an occultation path.