superconducting UV to near-IR camera

Abstract. ARCONS, the Array Camera for Optical to Near-infrared Spectrophotometry, was recently commissioned at the Coude ́ focus of the 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Ob-servatory. 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 incom-ing photon to better than several percent. The ground-breaking instrument is lens-coupled with a pixel scale of 0.23′′/pixel, with each pixel recording the arrival time (< 2µ 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 the transient phenomena