Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) have upgraded the camera on the 2-metre Faulkes Telescope South so that it now matches the one on FT North.

FT North has run for a few years with MuSCAT3 (Multicolor Simultaneous Camera for studying Atmospheres of Transiting exoplanets) and now MuSCAT4 has replaced the Spectral camera on FT South.

These cameras are identical and both provide the opportunity to collect data simultaneously in 4 filters. These filters are the Sloan/SDSS g’ r’ i’ filters and zs filter. The g’ and r’ filters can be thought of as green (or maybe blue/green) and red with the i’ and zs moving us toward the near-infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The default mode in queue-scheduled observations will allow our users to select a single exposure time where the camera will observe in each filter at the same time, making it much more efficient. More advanced users can select exposure times for the filters independently should they wish.

In real-time mode, only g’ r’ i’ are available as has been the case on FT North for a while now.