This photograph of Saturn, taken on film by Stephen Larson in 1974, was in its day the best image of the ringed planet ever taken. (Image: reproduced with permission from James R. Janesick, Scientific Charge-Coupled Devices, SPIE Press, 2001)
This year’s Nobel prize for physics was partly awarded to Willard Boyle and George Smith for inventing the charge-coupled device (CCD), the sensor that acts as the retina of digital cameras. But long before it reached consumers, the technology was used in astronomy. Explore these images to see how CCDs showed us space as never before.
See gallery: Images of space transformed by chips
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