ABOUT FACTS NET Astronomy

Think your camera is fast? Think again, a new British astronomical camera named Ultracam is ultra fast. It will scour the heavens taking up to 500 photos a second in three different colors simultaneously. Try and top that with you with your 35 mm. The camera is stationary, you wouldn't want to carry this instrument around, not only wouldn't it fit in your pocket but it might not fit in your car and if you drive a motorcycle you are just out of luck. The camera was developed by scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Warwick with collaboration from the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh.

So how does this wonder work? For one thing it employs the latest charged coupled device, these are knows as CCDs. They are sensitive to light and can enhance the light that hits the device. Do not confuse this device with the one in your digital camera. The CCD in the Ultracam if far more powerful and sensitive than anything you could ever buy. The goal for this camera is to hook it up to the VLT. The VLT or Very Large Telescope, will make a perfect instrument to attach this camera to and scientists have been working towards this goal for the last couple of years. The goal became a reality when the instrument was connected to the VLT on May 4, 2005.

A sky survey was taken many years ago using the camera at Mt. Polomar, in California. It was the standard for many, many years. Can you imagine what a sky survey would look like that was taken with the Ultracam. For one thing, the camera used at Polomar was a 48 inch Schmidt camera. The Ultracam uses the telescopes mirrors to get the image from so instead of a 48 inch mirror view you could have a 400 inch mirror view. Telescopes are based on light gathering ability. The way this is computed is by multiplying the mirror size by itself, thus the 48 Schmidt camera yields 2304 while a 400 inch telescope yields 160,000 which is almost 69.5 times the light received. I personally would love to see what a sky survey would look like using the Ultracam with the VLT. I am sure we would discover things that we have no idea of now.

So what are astronomers using the Ultracam for right now? They are using it to look for extrasolar planets, black-hole binary systems, pulsars, white dwarfs, asteroseismology, cataclysmic variables, brown dwarfs, gamma-ray bursts, active-galactic nuclei and Kuiper-belt objects. This should enrich our knowledge in these areas tremendously. Not only that but the fast photo taking ability may catch something that we never knew existed. Hey all you ufo buffs out there, maybe the camera will catch a shot of one?

So how powerful is this camera in reality? It is being used to study an object that is one million times fainter than the human eye can see and it can take photographs of it with exposures of 5 seconds or less. I would say that this is very powerful. Of course its power is dependent upon the size of the telescope it is connected to as I stated before. The object that I am referring to above is a black hole orbiting a star. The camera will provide measurements that are about a factor of ten better than any previous measurements.

It seems that astronomy has made tremendous leaps in the last few years, akin to the advances in computers. The advances in computers has also helped astronomy since many instruments used with the new telescopes are in themselves specialized computers. The adaptive optics on the new telescopes wouldn't have been possible without computers to adjust the mirrors of these scopes hundreds of times a second. Even this Ultracam is dependent on it's ccd chip. As new methods are designed to improve the production of computer chips, other chips benefit. What we seem to have now is technology driving technology.

The bottom line is that we can look for some great new photographs coming from Ultracam equipped telescopes.