When taking X-ray pictures of the Sun, the photos we take are sometimes over-exposed if there is too much light, which makes us lose detail in solar flares and other high-energy solar features. This is because the current technology we have to build cameras, CCDs (Charge Coupled Devices), take too long to process the photos, which results in too much light for the camera to process. We are working on calibrating a different kind of detector, CMOS (Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) detectors, which could solve this problem by processing the photographs much faster.

This project centered around assembling and calibrating the X-ray source in our lab, using a pre-calibrated, well-understood, commercially-purchased CMOS camera. That way, future projects which use the same X-ray source will already know how it behaves, given this calibration work. This presentation describes the process of mounting and testing this commercial CMOS camera, and the results of the process.