Cosmic ray impact caught last night

[bojan]

This is what I found on one of darks from last night
The path of the particle was close to parallel to the plane of the sensor (60D).

[blink138 (Pat)]

hi bojan what does it mean?
did it actually hit the 60d sensor? if it did thats pretty cool
pat

[bojan]

Originally Posted by blink138

...did it actually hit the 60d sensor? if it did thats pretty cool
pat

I believe this is what happened here.

[sheeny (Al)]

Best astronomy you'll ever do with the lens cap on!

Al.

[lepton3 (Ivan)]

That is a rare capture, and very interesting. You are presenting a pretty small target cross sectional area to get such a narrow angle strike.

I sometimes see a "particle shower" in the dark areas on the odd frame,
but that is always the debris of a front-on event, so much less rare.

From my days long in the past designing CMOS memory, we would be most concerned about alpha particles, they had the potential to liberate the most charge and upset a storage cell. Ironically, one of the most frequent sources was not cosmic rays, but the ceramic in some IC packages itself!

-Ivan

[bojan]

Originally Posted by lepton3

..Ironically, one of the most frequent sources was not cosmic rays, but the ceramic in some IC packages itself!

-Ivan

Yeah, it is quite possible that whatever hit my sensor came from Earth..
But it is nice to think it came from outer space

[sjastro]

It amazing how many cosmic ray hits I get in my refrigerator when I am preparing a library of darks for my ST-10XME.

Sometimes I wonder what those hits are doing to my frozen food.

Regards

Steven

[Terry B]

I wonder sometimes how many of these are local rather than from space. Almost every 5 min exposure I take with my st8xme will have hits like this on them. They are very annoying for spectra as they sometimes cross the spectra and corrupt it.