Gulbis: Instrumentation

    In collaboration with my colleagues at MIT and Williams College, we have constructed a set of instruments called Portable Occultation, Eclipse, and Transit Systems (POETS) that are optimized for visible-wavelength occultation observations. Each of these systems consists of a high-speed camera, an instrument control computer, and a GPS to trigger frames and establish accurate timing – all of which can be transported as carry-on luggage. The cameras contain back-illuminated CCDs, 512 x512 arrays of 16 micron pixels, with > 90% quantum efficiency, ~6 electrons read noise, and only 1.74 msec deadtime during frame transfer.

To date, we have deployed POETS with great success: the 18 March 2007 occultation of P445.3 by Pluto observed from the southwestern U.S., the 12 June 2006 occultation by Pluto of P384.2 observed from Australia and New Zealand, and the 11 July 2005 occultation of C313.2 by Charon observed from South America.  We additionally plan to utilize POETS for other high-speed, observational applications, such as extrasolar planet transits. 

    We recently constructed and mounted a POETS on NASA's 3-m Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. See the IRTF POETS website for details and updates.

Photo of POETS mounted on the side of SpeX at the IRTF.

Instrumentation publications:

Gulbis, A. A. S., J. L. Elliot, M. J. Person, B. A. Babcock, J. M. Pasachoff, S. P. Souza, and C. A. Zuluaga, Recent Stellar Occultation Observations Using High-Speed, Portable Camera Systems, in AIP Conf. Proc. 984, The Universe at Sub-Second Timescales, High Time Resolution Astrophysics, ed. D. Phelan, R. Oliver, A. Shearer (New York: AIP), 91-100, 2008.

Souza, S. P., B. A. Babcock, J. M. Pasachoff, A. A. S. Gulbis, J. L. Elliot, M. J. Person, POETS: Portable Occultation, Eclipse, and Transit System, Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacific, 118, 1550-1557, 2006.