The week of November 6

A brief advertisement before we get into this week’s news: One of our Resident Astronomers is retiring. If you are a PhD astronomer and interested in working on one of the largest optical telescopes in the world doing cutting edge research please consider applying: https://utdirect.utexas.edu/apps/hr/jobs/nlogon/171020014209

This week the big changes to the telescope have been the removal of the Prime Focus Instrument Platform (PFIP) work platform and the arrival of 3 more VIRUS units. The PFIP work platform, as the name suggests, allowed us to drop people off to work on the PFIP. We will still be able to work on the PFIP but now we have to do it from the JLG worker-lift. The work platform covered up a number of mirrors (about 10% of the light collecting area) as can be seen in the images below taken with our pupil viewing camera.

Two images of the HET pupil taken with our pupil viewing camera before (left) and after (right) the PFIP work platform was removed.

With the delivery of 3 more VIRUS units we now have 28 working VIRUS units or 56 spectrographs or more than 12,000 fibers on the sky!

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