Hahahaha. First you get the mechanism wrong for how CCDs work.
It isn't surprising that all instrumentation fools you so easily...you don't have any idea what any of it is measuring. You just take the reading the instrument is giving you, filter it through your belief in magic, and then just assume it is telling you what you want to hear.
Here...from the Rochester Institute of Technology....
"Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) were invented in the 1970s and originally found application as memory devices.
Their light sensitive properties were quickly exploited for imaging applications and they produced a major revolution in Astronomy. They improved the light gathering power of telescopes by almost two orders of magnitude. Nowadays an amateur astronomer with a CCD camera and a 15 cm telescope can collect as much light as an astronomer of the 1960s equipped with a photographic plate and a 1m telescope.
CCDs work by converting light into a pattern of electronic charge in a silicon chip. This pattern of charge is converted into a video waveform, digitised and stored as an image file on a computer."
And before you show how profoundly you are fooled by instrumentation and tell me that CCD's can detect infrared light, here...from Larson Electronics:
"Infrared light is no different from visible light. It behaves the same way, only it radiates at a frequency that is undetectable to the human eye. CCD devices, however, can detect this wavelength and thus form images from infrared illumination. In fact, some camera manufacturers have already exploited this natural characteristic of CCD’s and introduced versions of their devices that are touted as low light or night vision capable, yet in reality differ little from their normal offerings only by
having a source of infrared light included with the camera. True some devices now use CCD’s that are specially designed to increase their sensitivity to light in the infrared spectrum, it still remains though that almost all CCD’s are capable of capturing images in what for all practical purposes amounts to total darkness using infrared."
Here, from the SPIE digital library, in an article describing an experiment that involves an infrared telescope being launched outside the space shuttle..
"However, it is generally recognized that supplemental overview imagery acquired in the visible portion of the spectrum is necessary to assist in accurately interpreting the data generated by the infrared focal plane. For this purpose, the
TRE will be equipped with a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) Visible Light Sensor (VLS) that will yield the cloud and ground truth data needed to assist in pointing and scene verification."
Here from Texas A&M..
A CCD, or charged coupled device, is a device used in digital photography that
converts an optical image into electrical signal. CCD chips can
detect faint amounts of light and are capable of producing high resolution images needed in scientific research and applications thereof. CCDs are particularly useful in astronomical imagery due to their
great sensitivity to light/
Again, take your CCD into a dark room and point it at an ice cube...you will record exactly squat. If you believe you will get an image of an ice cube in a dark room with a CCD, you are in for a profound disappointment...and why? Because you have once again been completely bamboozled by instrumentation.
You know ian, there is literally volumes of information on how instrumentation works and what devices are recording and what they are not. It is available for anyone to read...so that anyone can avoid being fooled by instrumentation if they so desire. Do you want the magic to be true so badly that you just don't want to know what the instrumentation you reference is actually recording for fear that it might alter your belief in magic?