HiPERCAM is a quintuple-beam imager that saw first light on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in October 2017 and on the 10.4m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) in February 2018. The instrument uses re-imaging optics and 4 dichroic beamsplitters to record ugriz (300-1000nm) images simultaneously on its five CCD cameras. The detectors in HiPERCAM are frame-transfer devices cooled thermo-electrically to -90degC, thereby allowing both long-exposure, deep imaging of faint targets, as well as high-speed (over 1000 windowed frames per second) imaging of rapidly varying targets. In this paper, we report on the as-built design of HiPERCAM, its first-light performance on the GTC, and some of the planned future enhancements.
@article{arxiv.1807.00557,
title = {First light with HiPERCAM on the GTC},
author = {Vikram Dhillon and Simon Dixon and Trevor Gamble and Paul Kerry and Stuart Littlefair and Steven Parsons and Thomas Marsh and Naidu Bezawada and Martin Black and Xiaofeng Gao and David Henry and David Lunney and Christopher Miller and Marc Dubbeldam and Timothy Morris and James Osborn and Richard Wilson and Jorge Casares and Teo Munoz-Darias and Enric Palle and Pablo Rodriguez-Gil and Tariq Shahbaz and Antonio de Ugarte Postigo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.00557},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
11 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, Austin (10-15 June 2018)