Another spectacularly beautiful evening, with just a hint of a crescent moon... A great time for members of the Tech Ops team to venture across the plateau & get the slightly confused DIMM sorted out, so that observers can keep track of the seeing through the night.
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| The western horizon, as seen from the hostel |
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| The earthshine lighting up the dark part of the moon really was that obvious! |
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| Fun to see MoNet South open, with the shadows of the DIMM wranglers being cast on the building |
After multiple syncing attempts, we managed to convince the DIMM to measure the seeing on Mimosa, aka Beta Crucis - the 2nd brightest star in the Southern Cross. Happily, the seeing did steadily improve (from that initial 1.75") through the course of the wonderful clear, dark night.
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| Taking seeing measurements at last! |
Meanwhile, over at SALT - the observers were gearing up to do some stray-light tests with an infrared camera we'd borrowed from the new
PRIME telescope, that will be installed on the plateau next month.
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| Infrared camera borrowed from the (Japanese) PRIME team |
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| Not sure what we'll see, but hopefully not much! |
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| The camera was secured to the FIF, alongside the HRS fibres & near where the NIR IFU will attach |
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| Jonathan doing the honours: applying duct tape to secure the laptop needed to run the camera |
We were glad to see very little... Even with the dome lights on, & some encoders within the payload powered up. & the camera really was alive, turning on the calsys lamps did cause it to light up.
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| Watching eagerly in the control room, & seeing very little! |
So that's good news - at least there isn't anything hosing out infrared light up there...
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