There are two published demonstrations of the power of
high speed photometry with the TTF. The ability to link charge shuffling
with frequency switching means that different spectral bands can be compared
in such a fashion to minimize the impact of atmospheric & instrumental
instability. Differential measurement is an extremely powerful approach
to discovering small photometric variations between different bands.
A
Technique for Narrowband Time Series Photometry: The X-Ray Star V2116 Ophiuchi:
Margon & Deutsch (1998), PASP, 110, 912:
We have used innovative features of the Taurus Tunable Filter instrument
on the 3.9 m Anglo-Australian Telescope to obtain nearly continuous, high-throughput,
linear photometry of V2116 Oph in a 7 Å bandpass at the center of
the O i lambda8446 emission line. This instrumental technique shows promise
for applications requiring precise, rapid, narrowband photometry of faint
objects. The spectrum of V2116 Oph, the counterpart of GX 1+4 (=X1728-247),
is exotic, even among the unusual spectra of other optical counterparts
of compact Galactic X-ray sources. The second strongest emission line is
an unusual one, namely extremely prominent O i lambda8446, which is likely
to result from pumping by an intense Lybeta radiation field. As the X-radiation
from GX 1+4 is steadily pulsed, with typical pulsed fractions of 0.4, the
O i lambda8446 emission in V2116 Oph may also be strongly modulated with
the current 127 s period of the X-ray source. If so, this may well allow
us to obtain high signal-to-noise ratio radial velocity measurements and
thus to determine the system parameters. However, no such pulsations are
detected, and we set an upper limit of ~1% (full amplitude) on periodic
lambda8446 oscillations at the X-ray frequency. This value is comparable
to the amplitude of continuum oscillations observed on some nights by other
workers. Thus we rule out an enhancement of the pulsation amplitude in
O i emission, at least at the time of our observations.
Searching
for Weather in Brown Dwarfs: Tinney & Tolley
(1999), MNRAS (astro-ph/9809165): We have used an innovative
tuneable filter technique to carry out a search for the variability signatures
of meterological processes in the atmospheres of two nearby brown dwarfs.
We find no evidence for variability in the L-type brown dwarf DENIS-PJ1228-1547
in an observations spanning approximately half a rotation period (3 hours),
and evidence for variability in the M-type brown dwarf LP 944-20 in multiple
observations spanning approximately one third of a rotation period (1.5
hours).