ULTRACAM operations
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Sheffield
Department Name: Physics and Astronomy
Abstract
ULTRACAM is a digital camera capable of taking (and storing) up to 500 red, green and blue images per second. The instrument was built in just under 3 years by a consortium from the Universities of Sheffield, Warwick and the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh, using a £300,000 grant awarded by PPARC. ULTRACAM saw 'first light' on 16 May 2002 on the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope (WHT) on La Palma, and first light on the 8.2-m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile on 4 May 2005. To date, ULTRACAM has been awarded a total of 92 nights of time on these telescopes for projects as varied as white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, asteroseismology, pulsars, black-hole/neutron-star X-ray binaries, eclipsing binary stars, gamma-ray bursts, cataclysmic variables, extrasolar planets, active galactic nuclei, Kuiper Belt objects and Saturn's moon Titan. This grant proposal requests funding for the proper maintenance and operation of ULTRACAM, as well as a modest programme of minor upgrades, thereby ensuring that ULTRACAM maintains its position as the world's premier instrument for high-speed optical astrophysics. As well as maximising the return on PPARC's original investment, this money will also allow us to continue to offer ULTRACAM to others in the UK and astronomical community who wish to use it.
Organisations
Publications
Dhillon V
(2006)
A search for optical bursts from the rotating radio transient J1819-1458 with ULTRACAM
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Littlefair S
(2006)
Observations of ultracool dwarfs with ULTRACAM on the VLT: a search for weather? Observations of ultracool dwarfs
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Littlefair S
(2006)
ULTRACAM observations of SDSS J170213.26 + 322954.1 ??? an eclipsing cataclysmic variable in the period gap
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Littlefair S
(2006)
A Brown Dwarf Mass Donor in an Accreting Binary
in Science
Roques F
(2006)
Exploration of the Kuiper Belt by High-Precision Photometric Stellar Occultations: First Results
in The Astronomical Journal
Burleigh M
(2006)
The nature of the close magnetic white dwarf + probable brown dwarf binary SDSS J121209.31+013627.7*
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Mathioudakis M
(2006)
The periodic variations of a white-light flare observed with ULTRACAM
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Aerts C
(2006)
High-speed colourimetry of the subdwarf B star SDSS J171722.08+58055.8 with ULTRACAM
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Barros S
(2007)
ULTRACAM photometry of the ultracompact binaries V407 Vul and HM Cnc
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Dhillon V
(2007)
ULTRACAM: an ultrafast, triple-beam CCD camera for high-speed astrophysics
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society