The passage of cosmic ray secondaries through unthinned CCD detectors may produce numerous spurious images in moderate-length astronomical exposures min). The intensity of these cosmic ray tracks is usually greater than that of most of the features of interest. In the present paper we investigate the relative merits of several techniques for removing these artifacts from multiple CCD exposures of the same scene. We first investigate various single-point outlier rejectia criteria, and then go on to study techniques that make use of the spatial distribution of actual cosmic ray tracks. Applications of these techniques to typical astronomical CCD exposures are given.

Date Published: 21 November 1980
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 0264, Applications of Digital Image Processing to Astronomy, (21 November 1980); doi: 10.1117/12.959795

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0264:
Applications of Digital Image Processing to Astronomy
Denis A. Elliot, Editor(s)