A balloon flight test of a coded-mask telescope with a multi-element germanium detector

The use of a small array of germanium detectors to obtain high spectral resolution X-ray and γ-ray images of astronomical objects has been demonstrated with a coded mask telescope flown as a piggy-back instrument on the NASA GRIS balloon payload. sign of the experimental telescope is discussed and images of the Crab nebula and of Cygnus X-1 obtained during the flight are presented. The quality of the images is shown to be very close to that expected from simulations.