Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
ABSTRACT HiPERCAM is a portable, quintuple-beam optical imager that saw first light on the 10. 4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) in 2018. The instrument uses re-imaging optics and four dichroic beamsplitters to record u ₒ\, g ₒ\, r ₒ\, i ₒ\, z ₒ (320–1060 nm) images simultaneously on its five CCD cameras, each of 3. 1-arcmin (diagonal) field of view. The detectors in HiPERCAM are frame-transfer devices cooled thermo-electrically to 183 K, 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. A comparison-star pick-off system in the telescope focal plane increases the effective field of view to 6. 7 arcmin for differential photometry. Combining HiPERCAM with the world’s largest optical telescope enables the detection of astronomical sources to gs ∼ 23 in 1 s and gs ∼ 28 in 1 h. In this paper, we describe the scientific motivation behind HiPERCAM, present its design, report on its measured performance, and outline some planned enhancements.
Dhillon et al. (Fri,) studied this question.