HiPERCAM: A high-speed, quintuple-beam CCD camera for the study of rapid variability in the Universe

Abstract

HiPERCAM is a high-speed camera for the study of rapid variability in the Universe. The project is funded by a 3.5MEuro European Research Council Advanced Grant. HiPERCAM builds on the success of our previous instrument, ULTRACAM, with very significant improvements in performance thanks to the use of the latest technologies. HiPERCAM will use 4 dichroic beamsplitters to image simultaneously in 5 optical channels covering the u'g'r'i'z' bands. Frame rates of over 1000 per second will be achievable using an ESO CCD controller (NGC), with every frame GPS timestamped. The detectors are custom-made, frame-transfer CCDs from e2v, with 4 low-noise (2.5e-) outputs, mounted in small thermoelectrically-cooled heads operated at 180 K, resulting in virtually no dark current. The two reddest CCDs will be deep-depletion devices with anti-etaloning, providing high quantum efficiencies across the red part of the spectrum with no fringing. The instrument will also incorporate scintillation noise correction via the conjugate-plane photometry technique. The opto-mechanical chassis will make use of additive manufacturing techniques in metal to make a light-weight, rigid and temperature-invariant structure. First light is expected on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope on La Palma in 2017 (on which the field of view will be 10' with a 0.3"/pixel scale), with subsequent use planned on the 10.4m Gran Telescopio Canarias on La Palma (on which the field of view will be 4' with a 0.11"/pixel scale) and the 3.5m New Technology Telescope in Chile.

arXiv comment9 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, Edinburgh (26 June - 1 July, 2016)

References in corpus (8)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• A Massive Pulsar in a Compact Relativistic Binary
• ULTRACAM: an ultra-fast, triple-beam CCD camera for high-speed astrophysics
• The planets around NN Ser: still there
• Atmospheric Scintillation in Astronomical Photometry
• A brown dwarf mass donor in an accreting binary
• ULTRASPEC: a high-speed imaging photometer on the 2.4-m Thai National Telescope
• Furiously Fast and Red: Sub-second Optical Flaring in V404 Cyg during the 2015 Outburst Peak

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• Detection and timing of gamma-ray pulsations from the $707$ Hz pulsar J0952$-$0607
• A black widow population dissection through HiPERCAM multi-band light curve modelling
• Two decades of optical timing of the shortest-period binary star system HM Cancri
• Optical, X-ray, and $\gamma$-ray observations of the candidate transitional millisecond pulsar 4FGL J0427.8-6704
• System parameters of three short period cataclysmic variable stars
• Scintillation-limited photometry with the 20-cm NGTS telescopes at Paranal Observatory
• Atmospheric Scintillation Noise in Ground-Based Exoplanet Photometry
• Statistical Signatures of Nanoflare Activity. II. A Nanoflare Explanation for Periodic Brightenings in Flare Stars observed by NGTS
• Searching for Sub-Second Stellar Variability with Wide-Field Star Trails and Deep Learning
• Limiting the accretion disk light in two mass transferring hot subdwarf binaries
• On-sky silicon photomultiplier detector performance measurements for millisecond to sub-microsecond optical source variability studies
• India's first robotic eye for time domain astrophysics: the GROWTH-India telescope
• Light curve fingerprints: an automated approach to the extraction of X-ray variability patterns with feature aggregation -- an example application to GRS 1915+105