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The Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) is a 4 meter class telescope for observation of the solar atmosphere currently in the construction phase. The Visible Broadband Imager (VBI) is a diffraction limited imaging instrument planned to be the first-light instrument in the ATST instrumentation suite. The VBI is composed of two branches, the "VBI blue" and the "VBI red", and uses state-of-the-art narrow bandwidth interference filters and two custom designed high speed filter wheels to take bursts of images that will be re-constructed using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) optimized near-real-time speckle image reconstruction engine. At first light, the VBI instrument will produce diffraction-limited movies of solar activity at eight discrete wavelengths with a field of view of 2 arc minutes square. In this contribution, the VBI design team will discuss the capabilities of the VBI and describe the design of the instrument, highlighting the unique challenges faced in the development of this unique instrument. |
