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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
performance simultaneous measurement of the different wavelength bands to distinguish between colour and brightness variations.
performance imaging capability in order to simultaneously measure target, comparison stars and sky background and to avoid the need for fixed apertures