Congratulations to Resident Astronomer John Caldwell on his retirement! It is bittersweet to see Anneke and you leave, but we know you are heading on a new and exciting adventure. Thank you for your many years of dedicated service. Safe travels and keep us posted!
HET Staff Picture taken Feb. 8th, 2018
The next few days are going to be very busy at the HET. The HET team along with help from Austin will be installing IFU’s for the second virus enclosure in preparation for more virus units to be installed. This involves stringing fiber cables from the enclosure up to the top of the tracker to be attached to the IHMP (Input Head Mounting Plate). The team will also be investigating and trying to remedy problems with the IHMP dither mechanism. During this time there will be no science or engineering related night work due to immobility of tracker, structure or dome for the IFU deployment.
It has been quiet during the day at the HET this week with day staff on holiday. If the weather clears the night staff will be plenty busy working through the queue. The current weather outlook for the week is cloudy with possible showers. Monday night we were able to do science through thin clouds and successfully collected data for many programs that do not require perfect seeing or zero cloud cover. The bulk of the science data collected in the beginning of the week has been with LRS2-B and LRS2-R. Fingers crossed the weather clears as we approach the new moon on Thursday.
This week has been an exciting week ramping up to science. The Board of Visitor Staff Excellence Award Winners were announced by Director Armandroff and are as follows: Henry Cantu, Angela Davis, Steve Odewahn, and Trent Peterson. Congratulations to the winners.
We are quickly moving in to science mode with the upcoming new moon. Currently this week the first half of each night is being used primarily for science with the second half used for engineering due to the moon. The weather looks to be clearing over the holiday weekend, so hopefully we will be able to collect some good data for the HET community!
One of the many powerful thunderstorms that passed by us this month. This one produced hail just north of the HET.
This week we finally had a break in the stormy weather and started wave front sensor commissioning. A team from Austin came out and installed an imager and wave front sensor in the IHMP (Input Head Mounting Plate) to calibrate all other wave front sensors on the telescope. These devices once calibrated will help keep the tracker in perfect alignment with the mirror to optimize the observations we are taking for science. This will be the main focus for the next month. Hopefully the weather is more cooperative than it has been. If you would like to see a time-lapse of some of the recent storms follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shRD2WmPWd4
16 Virus units and their controllers lined up in the HET receiving bay. The controllers are the small boxes near the center of the image.
This week has been a busy one for the virus units at the HET. All of the virus units were removed from the enclosure, backfilled, pumped to vacuum and reinstalled. While doing this cooling fans were installed on all of the virus controllers to help keep the electronics cool. They hope that this will make the virus system a bit more stable.
The HET has been churning out lots of science during dark time this month as well. All groups that have submitted targets have received data!
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