The week of August 7

We have completed the 2017-2 trimester (April – July). It was a very successful. The HET Board allowed us to transition from 2 weeks of science operations per lunation to 3 weeks of science operations. We also completed a large commissioning effort of 27 hours of VIRUS exposures on well studied EGS fields. Below are some statistics from the trimester: 138.5 hours of acceptable high priority exposures and 40.5 hours of low priority filler exposures. The average overhead for LRS2 per requested visit was 7.9 minutes which is nearly a factor of two better than the overheads with LRS before the Wide Field Upgrade. The average visit length was 18 minutes long and the longest completed visit was 120 minutes. The completion rate for priority 0 targets was 97.2%, for priority 1 targets was 98.1%, for priority 2 targets was 90.1% and for priority 3 targets was 96.4%.

For the new 2017-3 trimester (August – November) we will continue with the 3 weeks of science per lunation. The HET board has approved the first HETDEX time as well as Guaranteed Time Observing (GTO) for the commissioning team of LRS2. In addition, we are expecting to see the arrival of the Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF) spectrograph.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *