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ULTRACAM was designed to study compact astronomical objects which eclipse, transit, occult, flicker, flare, pulsate or oscillate, thereby opening up an unexplored region of observational parameter space. The instrument must therefore have:


science the capability of taking short exposures (from milli-seconds to seconds) with negligible dead-time between exposures
design multi-channels (3 or more) covering a wide wavelength range in order to (minimally) distinguish a blackbody spectrum from a stellar spectrum