Detector for fast imaging

SHARK-VIS is equipped with two Andor Zyla 4.2 water-cooled sCMOS camera: the guide camera and the science camera. Both of them can reach a frame-rate of 1000 frames per second using a small subset of the sensor, which will be utilized to explore the time axis information. Observations with SHARK-VIS will be performed using the highest frame rate compatible with the brightness of the target and the atmospheric turbulence conditions. While the guide camera recenters and stabilizes the beam, the science camera can acquire high frame-rate images exploiting the "fast imaging" approach. The sCMOS pixel response is linear in time as we expected. Dark current  and Read out Noise (RON) for this camera model are extremely low and while the first one depends on the exposure time, the second has a value almost constant of 1e- for different integration times, as shown in the following figures. This is particularly important for faint target objects in which a single photon count is not negligible and could make a difference between a true and false signal detection (e.g. exoplanet direct imaging).