This award provides funds to build a portable, high-speed data acquisition system to obtain photometric data at astronomical observatories on time scales as short as 0.1 millisecond. Because the thermal and dynamical time scales of a number of important astrophysical objects can be as short as fractions of a millisecond, the increased time resolution offered by this system will allow investigations of the temporal properties of a variety of objects, including young supernovae such as SN1987A, accretion disks, pulsars, and accreting compact objects, not otherwise possible. While bright supernovae are discovered two or three times each millenia, the February 1987 explosion of supernova 1987A in opportunity. this object is the brightest supernova in three centuries and the probability that it harbors a rapidly spinning neutron star at its center is very high. Observations of rapidly rotating neutron stars can yield a wealth of information, including insight into the general properties of condensed matter at nuclear densities.
