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Digital Photography is the process of recording pictures by means of capturing light on a light-sensitive medium, such as a film or electronic sensor (CCD). Today's scientific photographers primarily use digital cameras, as opposed to film cameras, to accomplish their task. Aerospace photographers and biomedical photographers use variations of digital cameras, such as infrared (thermal imagers) or gamma ray/ x-ray imagers. An understanding of how a digital camera works and of the basic principles of photons is necessary in preparing to become a scientific photographer.
History of Digital Astronomical Photography:
During the 1970s charge-coupled devices (CCDs) became the leading light detector for astronomy and displaced photographic plates from various (although not all) applications. The main camera for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), an orbiting observatory planned since the 1970s and launched in 1990, carried CCDs, and the many remarkable images they have secured have been the main means by which the public has become aware of the telescope's activities. CCDs were also incorporated in the camera for the Galileo mission to Jupiter, one of the most important planetary spacecraft of the late 1990s and early 2000s. A further milestone was reached early in 2004, when two NASA landers began to transmit high-quality pictures of the surface of Mars from digital stereoscopic cameras.
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