Willard Boyle and George Smith of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, have won 1/2 of the Nobel prize for their development of the charge-coupled device (CCD), an electronic chip that converts light into a digital signal. From Nature Magazine: "In 1969, Boyle and Smith developed a chip that could transform light into an electronic signal. The duo used newly discovered metal oxide semiconductors that could convert photons into a flow of electrons, which could be read from the edges of the chip and used to recreate the image. The ability to digitally capture light has found application in nearly every field of science particularly astronomy. "Basically, they revolutionized optical astronomy," says Mark Casali, head of instrumentation at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. Before the advent of CCDs, astronomers were imaging stars using photographic plates, which were less sensitive and less precise than their digital successors, Casali says. Using CCD cameras, astronomers have been able to discover faint galaxies and even see fluctuations in a star's light created by an orbiting planet." "The detectors also made space-based astronomy a reality, says Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which coordinates science for the Hubble Space Telescope. "It made telescopes like the Hubble possible," he says. "You could now put large electronic detectors in space that could beam down digital pictures of some of the faintest objects human beings have ever seen."" Boyle was born in Canada and lives in Halifax now. Here's some comments in the Globe and Mail.