BVIT: the Berkeley Visible Imaging Tube

In addition to SALT's first-generation instruments, a visitor instrument called the Berkeley Visible Image Tube (BVIT) was installed on the telescope during early 2009. Commissioning and engineering runs were carried out for ten nights in January and  seven nights March 2009. The BVIT team is Barry Welsh, Ossy Siegmund, Jason McPhate, and Doug Rogers from the Space Sciences Laboratory at the Univ. of California, Berkeley. See the Berkeley BVIT page for additional details.

This auxiliary port instrument is a micro-channel plate, photon-counting detector system designed for microsecond optical photometric imaging. Unlike conventional CCD devices, the S-20 photocathode has no read noise and is capable of recording photon events in very short time intervals. The instrument can handle data rates up to ~1.1 MHz, and events are time-tagged to 25 nsec.   BVIT has a 1.9 arcmin diameter field of view and contains user-selectable U, B, V, R, and neutral density filters.

BVIT expects to receive a new detector (Supergen2) in late 2010 or early 2011.  This upgrade will significantly increase the quantum efficiency at wavelengths longer than 500 nm.

For more information on BVIT, please see the following reference:

Siegmund, O.H.W.S., McPhate, J., Tremsin, A., Vallerga, J., Welsh, B.Y. and Wheatley, J.,  2008, High time resolution astrophysics with the BVIT in The Universe at Sub-Second Timescales, AIP Conf. Proc., Vol. 984, 103-114.