Astronomical OCam camera captures 1500 images in a second

The all new ultra-fast camera called the OCam, together developed by ESO and three other French laboratories is sure to take astronomy to a higher level. The three French laboratories include the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Grenoble and the Observatoire de Haute Provence. This camera captures 1500 finely exposed images every second including even the faint objects.
This high precision faint light camera captures images at a resolution of 240 x 240 pixels. It is a must have for all the adaptive optics instruments, that are largely used in ground-based telescopes. The ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), ground-based astronomy flagship facility of Europe is said to have incorporated this camera.
“The performance of this breakthrough camera is without an equivalent anywhere in the world. The camera will enable great leaps forward in many areas of the study of the Universe,” says Norbert Hubin, head of the Adaptive Optics department at ESO. OCam will be part of the second-generation VLT instrument SPHERE. To be installed in 2011, SPHERE will take images of giant exoplanets orbiting nearby stars.
Atmospheric chaos leads to blur images taken through various ground-based telescopes. OCam combats this problem with its CCD220 detector. This detector offers fast as well as sensitive performance. A CCD camera often suffers from readout noise due to flawed operation of physical electronic devices. OCam offers ten times lesser readout noise than other conventional cameras used in the detectors. This seems to justify its sensitivity and ability to capture faint objects.
“Thanks to this technology, all the new generation instruments of ESO’s Very Large Telescope will be able to produce the best possible images, with an unequalled sharpness,” declares Jean-Luc Gach, from the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, France, who led the team that built the camera.
OCam comprises of a control system developed in France with German and Spanish support, sensitive detectors developed in the UK and has been able to see the light of the day due to the European collaboration.
Technology has always been a part of major discoveries. We wish that the OCam camera too leads to new breakthroughs in astronomy.