Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2006
A simple and straightforward method to assess therelative temporal fluctuation of the individual pixels in a CCDarray with respect to the fluctuation of the spatial average isproposed. This procedure is based on the comparison of thelow-frequency temporal noise of the individual pixels and thevalue of this magnitude averaged over the entire CCD. Moreover,this method is able to detect the presence of bad pixels withinthe array (drifting and flicking). The importance of this studyresides in the need to know whether or not the behavior of theindividual pixels can be approximated by that of the spatialaverage and to assess the stability of Nonuniformity Correctionalgorithms (NUC). Once the mathematical formulation was developed,it was applied to the analysis of a specific CCD array, theSony ICX414AL. The results show three different trends inthe behavior of its pixels.