In short

As members of the former Instrumentation Group at the Argelander Institute for Astronomy (AIfA) of the University of Bonn we have continued the successful technical developments with our own private company "Bonn-Shutter GmbH". We cooperate with the University. Our focus is on high precision exposure shutters of various formats. Bonn Shutters with apertures from 23mm to 1310mm are in use at CCD cameras for telescopes at major astronomical observatories around the world.

Our shutters are slit type shutters with a rectangular or circular aperture. They are low acceleration impact-free device. They consist of three main components --- mechanics, control electronics hardware and control electronics software --- which play together to achieve the shutter performance presented in the table below.

Bonn Shutter parameters and specs

Shortest exp. time	About 1msec.
Exposure homogeneity	Deviations <+-0.5% at 100msec exposure time.
Exposure  time accuracy	About 0.3msec.
Expected lifetime	>1 Million operations (Endurance test with 10**7 operations passed)
Dead time	0.2sec - 1sec depending on aperture size
Blade material	Carbon fibre or sandwich
Movement control	Microcontroller system. Software programmable velocity profile.
Exposure control	External, TTL (but internal exposure timing provided).
Control Interfaces	Control and status lines, RS232 line.