ARCONS: a Highly Multiplexed Superconducting UV-to-Near-IR Camera

ARCONS, the Array Camera for Optical to Near-infrared Spectrophotometry, was recently commissioned at the coudé focus of the 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory. At the heart of this unique instrument is a 1024-pixel Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID), exploiting the Kinetic Inductance effect to measure the energy of the incoming photon to better than several percent. The ground-breaking instrument is lens-coupled with a pixel scale of 0''.23/pixel, each pixel recording the arrival time (< 2 μ sec) and energy of a photon (~10%) in the optical to near-IR (0.4-1.1 microns) range. The scientific objectives of the instrument include the rapid follow-up and classification of transient phenomena.