High Speed Imaging Photometer for Occultations (HIPO)
Special Purpose Principal Investigator Science Instrument
Principal Investigator:
Edward W. Dunham
Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, AZ, USA
HIPO was designed to provide simultaneous high-speed time resolved imaging photometry at two optical wavelengths. The primary HIPO detectors were e2v CCD47-20 1024x1024 pixel frame transfer CCDs with plate scales of 0.33''x0.33'' pixels at low resolution and 0.05''x0.05'' pixels at high resolution. The HIPO field of view (FOV) was a 5.6 arcmin square, the 8 arcmin diagonal of which corresponded to the 8 arcmin diameter SOFIA FOV. The filter set included the Johnson (UBVRI) and Sloan (u’g’r’I’z’) filters as well as a filter for methane at 890 nm. A number of readout modes were available allowing the observer to optimize the subframe size, speed, noise, full well and linearity tradeoff for any particular event.
HIPO could be co-mounted with the First Light Infrared Test Eperiment CAMera (FLITECAM) providing simultaneous optical and near-infrared imaging for transient events. Effective February 2018, NASA retired FLITECAM and HIPO.
References
Dunham et al., "HIPO: a high-speed imaging photometer for occultations," Ground-based Instrumentation for Astronomy, Alan F. M. Moorwood & Masanori Iye, Editors, Proc. SPIE 5492, 592 (2004), DOI: 10.1117/12.552152 [ pdf ]
E. W. Dunham, "The optical design of HIPO: a high-speed imaging photometer for occultations," Airborne Telescope Systems II, Ramsey K. Melugin & Hans-Peter Roeser, Editors, Proc. SPIE 4857, 62 (2003), DOI: 10.1117/12.458819 [ pdf ]