An optoelectronic multichannel detection system for the study of the visible light emission of a vacuum circuit breaker arc is described. The system consists of two multiple slit collimator assemblies coupled directly to the arc discharge chamber and an electronic detection part. The light emitted by the arc is collected by the two collimator assemblies and is transmitted through optical fibres to the electronic detection part. By using a new, simple computational method two-dimensional plots of the vacuum arc light emission at different times are obtained.