The use of commercial CCD cameras as linear detectors in the physics undergraduate teaching laboratory

A commercial charge-coupled device TV camera has been combined with a computer video digitizer to provide an inexpensive linear two-dimensional optical detector that can be used to collect spectral and spatial information. The equipment is capable of storing an image of pixels, with eight-bit precision. Software has been developed to process and display the data. The system has been used in a first-year physics laboratory to make quantitative measurements of position and intensity of Fraunhofer diffraction patterns and to record optical emission spectra.