Aero-Terms!

Aero-Terms are designed to be a daily reminder of the terms, names, acronyms and explanations of the unique language that populates the aviation world. Aerospace, sport aviation, fixed wing, helo, you name it... it's all fair game.

Aero-Terms should serve as a quick but intriguing reminder of the terms you may use every day, or an introduction to an aspects of the Aero-World you may not yet be familiar with. ANN also encourages readers to go beyond the FMI link, and further research any intriguing terms.

Suggestions for future Aero-Terms are ALWAYS welcome, as are additions or discussion of the explanations given for each Aero-Term.

Charge-Coupled Device (CCD)

An electronic detector that records visible light from stars and galaxies to make photographs. These detectors are very sensitive to the extremely faint light of distant galaxies. They can see objects that are 1,000 million times fainter than the eye can see. CCDs are electronic circuits composed of light-sensitive picture elements (pixels), tiny cells that, placed together, resemble mesh on a screen door. The same CCD technology is used in digital cameras. The Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 has four CCDs; each contains 640,000 pixels. The light collected by each pixel is translated into a number. These numbers (all 2,560,000 of them) are sent to ground-based computers, which convert them into an image.

FMI: www.nasa.gov