Invited Talk: Stephen HollandTitle: The Revolution in Astronomy Enabled by Charge-Coupled Devices

The charge-coupled device (CCD) was invented by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith of Bell Laboratories in October of 1969 “in a discussion lasting not much more than an hour”. The charge-coupling concept was experimentally verified “in less than a week”, and Tompsett and others reported the first imaging CCD in late 1971. The CCD was introduced to NASA researchers in 1972, and an R&D effort began at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to assess the potential of CCDs for planetary exploration and the Large Space Telescope (Hubble Space Telescope). The first image taken with a JPL CCD camera at a ground-based astronomical telescope occurred in 1976, and thus began a revolution in electronic image sensors for astronomy that continues to the present day. The CCDs on the HST yielded spectacular scientific results from 2.44 and later 32 Mpixel cameras. Present-day CCD imaging and spectroscopic cameras operating both in space and at ground-based observatories feature pixels counts in the 100’s of Mpixels, and the 3.2 Gpixel Rubin Observatory LSST Camera “first light” is expected in 2024. In this talk we will describe the physics and technology of CCDs as well as some of the major scientific breakthroughs enabled by CCD detectors on advanced telescopes. A short list includes the discoveries of exoplanets and dark energy, as well as evidence for both Baryon oscillation in the early Universe and the onset of the reionization epoch. We will describe modern advancements including fully depleted CCDs and CMOS image sensors including electron-counting versions of both.