Chimera High-Speed Multi-Color Photometer

Overview

​Chimera is a high-speed photometer with simultaneous three-color photometry in the Sloan r’ (562-695 nm), i’ (695-844), and z’ (826-920 nm) bands.  The optical design provides well-corrected fields of view of 9.7 arcmin in the z’ band and 6.0 arcmin in r’ and i’ bands.  The wide field of view facilitates acquisition and tracking of rapidly moving satellites and allows for a variety of photometric calibration methods.  The optical design uses a wide-field collimator, two dichroic beam splitters, and three re-imagers. The design is optimized for the Steward Observatory Kuiper 1.54 m Telescope, although other telescopes can be supported with the exchange of the wide-field collimator. Chimera utilizes three Princeton Instruments Pro-EM HS cameras, which provide data at rates up to 228 Hz in full frame mode.  Rates over 1000 Hz are possible by defining photometric regions of interest (ROIs).

Specifications

Chimera AMONG Peers

Observing PROGRAMS

Russian SL-12 Rocket Body Colors and Rotational Periods

Black Hole Candidate MAXI J1820+070

Publications and documents

Harrison Krantz, Eric C. Pearce, Louis Avner, Olivier Durney, Corwynn Sauve, "Chimera: a high-speed three-color photometer for space surveillance and astronomy," Proc. SPIE 10702, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VII, 107024R (6 July 2018)

Eric C. Pearce, Harrison Krantz, Louis Avner, and Kris Rockowitz, "Chimera: A high-speed three-color photometer for Satellite Characterization," AMOS Conferences 2018.

The videos below show the remarkable flashing of the Crab Pulsar in visible light. The upper one is slightly processed and the lower shows the raw frames.  This kind of observation is difficult to make- but with the high speed data acquisition of Chimera the nature of the pulsar is revealed beautifully.

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