Burst or Bust: ISAAC at Antu Sets New Standards with Lunar Occultations

Abstract

Imagine a car as fast as a Ferrari, and as cheap as a Trabi. Sounds crazy? Maybe it is, but when it comes to high angular resolution in astronomy there is something that comes close to the miracle: lunar occultations. As the Moon moves over a background star, the phenomenon of diffraction causes tenuous, quick fringes to appear in the stellar light just before it vanishes. The fringes carry valuable information on the size of the source, on scales much smaller than possible with even a perfect, extremely large telescope. Paranal is now superbly equipped to perform this kind of observation, and for that matter all sorts of high-speed near-IR photometry. And the results are impressive. Find out more about the ISAAC burst mode, which is now officially supported from Period 79.