A totally new type of optical detector has been used on the William Herschel Telescope to directly measure intensity and colour changes in a faint, rapidly variable binary star system, UZ Fornacis, for the first time. A team from the Space Science Department of the European Space Agencys Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands (ESA/ESTEC), who have developed the S-Cam camera, were joined by astronomers from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) in the UK to exploit this advanced instrument.

A totally new concept in optical detector instrumentation has made its first appearance at the William Herschel Telescope on 2 February 1999. The Superconducting Tunnel Junction Camera (S-CAM), designed and built by members of the Astrophysics Division of the European Space Agency, consists of a photon counting system which provides position and arrival time of each detected photon, along with the photon energy for the first time in history of optical astronomy.