The week of Nov 2

We have big news this week. We have officially declared first light on the wide field upgrade for the HET. Please see:

Upgrade HET Sees First Light

This is the first light image from the 29th of July.   The image quality is 1.3" and we were only an arcminute from the target of interest.

This is the first light image from the 29th of July. The image quality is 1.3″ and we were only an arcminute from the target of interest.

Now that verification of the WFU corrector optics is complete we can get started on operational aspects of the new HET. This next week we are collecting data with the guide probes which will allow us to start the software commissioning of the guide probes next week.

We have cleared out the temporary clean room we installed in our loading bay so we can now have access from the mirror lab to the HET dome floor. This means that the mirror team will start doing mirror re-coating in the near future.

Other interesting news comes from our big hail storm in the past month. It broke many car windows damaged a few of the residents’ roofs and below we show the damage to the HET dome. Thankfully no leaks that we can detect.

In the big hail storm of 2015 that fully covered the road in several inches of hail the HET dome took a bit of a beating.

In the big hail storm of 2015 that fully covered the road in several inches of hail the HET dome took a bit of a beating.

Since the last blog posting we had our most senior telescope operator retire. We wish her well in all of her next adventures. In the mean time we have posted the position and it is open now, probably for two more weeks.

Telescope Operator Position now Open

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