On March 25th three students from UNC Pembroke presented a talk titled "Learning How to do CCD Photography in a Small College Observatory" at the North Carolina American Association of Physics. The students described the early states of the systematic observation and photography of the night sky using UNCP's 16" Meade LX200 GPS telescope and several CCD cameras. They also described several of the different software packages used and display some of our first pictures recently taken.

Utilizing Sky 6 software to communicate with the telescope the students were able to take monochrome pictures of galaxies, nebulas and star clusters. Once these pictures were taken, the students combined them using the CCD software and Maxim DL in a process of piecing the individual filtered pictures together into a colored finished product.

Due to physical limitation in the construction of CCDs, pixels within CCDs are not identical to one another. The pixels that are within a CCD each have a minor different gain or QE (Quantum Efficiency) value in relation to its neighboring pixels. To correct this problem, it is necessary to flatten these relative responses of each pixel to the radiation that it is absorbing. This is accomplished with a flat field image, which is ideally, an image that consist of uniform illumination of each pixel by a light source that has an identical spectral response to the images taken. This should result in a flat that is spectrally and spatially flat.

Dark fields are a way by which the thermal noise (dark current) in a CCD can be measured. Taking of these fields are necessary due to the fact that all materials that have temperatures much greater then that of absolute zero are subject to internal thermal "noise". Since this condition will apply to the silicon inside a CCD chip and when the temperature is high enough, the valence electrons will become free. Once these electrons are free from their bonds, they will be collected in the potential wells of the pixels with the other electrons. So when the read out is produced, these "dark current electrons" will be part of the incoming signal and be indiscernible from the true astronomical photons. In taking and using these fields, one is able to eliminate the dark current electrons and have the true astronomical photons make up the picture.