The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) is a balloon-borne Compton telescope designed for the study of astrophysical sources in the soft gamma-ray regime (200 keV-20 MeV). NCT's ten high-purity germanium crossed-strip detectors measure the deposited energies and three-dimensional positions of gamma-ray interactions in the sensitive volume, and this information is used to restrict the initial photon to a circle on the sky using the Compton scatter technique. Thus NCT is able to perform spectroscopy, imaging, and polarization analysis on soft gamma-ray sources. NCT is one of the next generation of Compton telescopes -so-called compact Compton telescopes (CCTs) -which can achieve effective areas comparable to COMPTEL's with an instrument that is a fraction of the size. The Crab Nebula was the primary target for the second flight of the NCT instrument, which occurred on 17-18 May 2009 in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Analysis of 29.3 ks of data from the flight reveals an image of the Crab at a significance of 4σ. This is the first reported detection of an astrophysical source by a CCT.

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A long duration gamma-ray burst, GRB 160530A, was detected by the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) during the 2016 COSI Super Pressure Balloon campaign. As a Compton telescope, COSI is inherently sensitive to the polarization of gamma-ray sources in the energy range 0.2-5.0 MeV. We measured the polarization of GRB 160530A using 1) a standard method (SM) based on fitting the distribution of azimuthal scattering angles with a modulation curve, and 2) an unbinned, maximum likelihood method (MLM). In both cases, the measured polarization level was below the 99% confidence minimum detectable polarization levels of 72.3 ± 0.8% (SM) and 57.5 ± 0.8% (MLM). Therefore, COSI did not detect polarized gamma-ray emission from this burst. Our most constraining 90% confidence upper limit on the polarization level was 46% (MLM).

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We report recent advances in hard-x-ray optics—including record spatial resolution—and in staining techniques that enable synchrotron microradiology to produce neurobiology images of quality comparable to electron and visible microscopy. In addition, microradiology offers excellent penetration and effective three-dimensional detection as required for many neuron studies. Our tests include tomographic reconstruction based on projection image sets.