Dhillon, Vik; Dixon, Simon; Gamble, Trevor; Kerry, Paul; Littlefair, Stuart; Parsons, Steven; Marsh, Thomas; Bezawada, Naidu; Black, Martin; Gao, Xiaofeng; Henry, David; Lunney, David; Miller, Christopher; Dubbeldam, Marc; Morris, Timothy; Osborn, James; Wilson, Richard; Casares, Jorge; Muñoz-Darias, Teo; Pallé, Enric; Rodriguez-Gil, Pablo; Shahbaz, Tariq; de Ugarte Postigo, Antonio
Bibliographical reference
Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 10702, id. 107020L 11 pp. (2018).
Description
HiPERCAM is a quintuple-beam imager that saw first light on the 4.2 m
William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in October 2017 and on the 10.4 m Gran
Telescopio Canarias (GTC) in February 2018. The instrument uses re-
imaging optics and 4 dichroic beamsplitters to record ugriz (300-1000
nm) images simultaneously on its five CCD cameras. The detectors in
HiPERCAM are frame-transfer devices cooled thermo-electrically to
90°C, 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.
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