An Imaging Photon Counting Intensified CCD for High Speed Photometry

The scientific performance evaluation of a photon countingimaging system is presented. The detector is constituted by an ICCD camera with RbTe photocathode(optimized for UV radiation), and dedicated electronics for the acquisition and analysis ofthe events. For each photon event on the CCD, a real-time centroid calculation is performed, inorder to reach spatial resolution down to 25 m FWHM. The system has been tested usingthe 182 cm telescope of the Asiago Observatory.A standard stars field through U Johnson filter,and the Crab pulsar (PSR 0531+21) were observed. From the photometric data, relative magnitudes of the standard stars have been derived, showing a goodlinearity of the detector in the range of flux under consideration, as expected fromprevious laboratory measurements.The pulsar's data have been processed by FFT and epoch foldingtechniques to testthe detector's timing performances in the highest resolutionmode (4.512 ms).These observations show that a space resolved time analysis ofperiodic sources can be performed with 10^-7 s accuracy.