The superconducting camera, SCAM, is an ultra-fast photon-counting camera developed by the European Space Agency. It is cooled to just 0.3 K (three-tenths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero). This enables its sensitive electronic detectors, known as superconducting tunnel junction detectors, to register almost every photon of light that falls into it. Its advantage over a CCD (charge-coupled device) is that it can measure both the brightness (rate) of the incoming photon stream and the colour (wavelength or energy) of each individual photon.

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