NIR First (Star) Light!!

It's a beautiful clear day, which bodes well for getting on sky with NIR this evening!  During the afternoon we got to see some parts of the new 1.8m PRIME telescope being lifted into the dome...

Several of the bits are too big to go in horizontally through the slit in the dome.

Which makes for even cooler photo-ops!

Happily, our SAAO videographer-in-chief (Willie Koorts) is up here this week, recording every move they make - so there'll undoubtedly be another awesome production from him soon!

Over at SALT, the Tech team was feverishly trying to get the FIF guider fixed up, since it suddenly started misbehaving ahead of the big occasion.  They also wanted to get the new calsys hardware installed this evening & the primary mirror was due for an alignment.  But since it's the NIR team's last night here until late August, we decided to grab what we could: run without the guider (we can choose brighter targets to knock the exposure times down), give up on the new calsys for now (the current calsys will suffice for tonight) & we can align the mirror After getting starlight through the instrument!  

The mirror had at least half a dozen segments sticking out due to various actuators having reached their limits the other day, so the out-of-focus acquisition image on SALTICAM was pretty gruesome!

It looked even worse on the FIF acquisition camera - just segments everywhere!  Fortunately, Moses recognised the need to laugh in this situation...

Even once the focus had been improved, the star image was still fairly comical!  That said, we are testing an IFU after all, so better to have an extended object 😋

First just imaging mode - to see starlight in the fibres...  First (star) Light!!

Next, Marsha inserted the grating, snapped a few second exposure & got our first on-sky NIR spectra!!  Spot the very happy PI 😊

Here are spectra from the fibres that contained some of the brighter blobs, complete with loads of dark absorption lines at the red end.

There was almost an air of disbelief that we've actually reached this milestone, at long last!

& the students could not have timed their visit much better, it's a rare opportunity to get to witness first-light on a major new instrument.

They were treated to the full download from Joshua, NIR explainer extraordinaire!

After digesting the excitement of capturing those initial science photons with NIR, Xola & Jonathan did a mirror alignment to clean things up.  We then selected a target from the "Nice Stuff" catalogue - the spectacular Eagle Nebula - snapping a few shots through different filters that'll yield a zippy PR image.

This target was then used to do some tests to check the orientation of the IFU on the sky & to verify the performance of the FIF while carrying the NIR IFU & sky bundle.  The FIF positioning was spot-on & neatly repeatable, & the fibre arrangement was confirmed.  The central parts of the IFU are routed to the upper & lower parts of the slit & hence those spectra appear near the top & bottom parts of the image.

After a few more hours of playing around on sky, we realised it was way past time for the PI to pop the champagne! 

Nicely done Marsha - in Every Way!

CHEERS!! 😎

What a great way for the instrument team to wrap up the first two phases of the NIR campaign!  Now they head home for a while, attend the SPIE conference in Montreal & come back here in late August for the science commissioning phase.

With that we'll leave Lee & Xola to the rest of their observing week, & the exhausted but triumphant Tech Ops team to fix up the FIF guider + other collateral damage associated with bringing a new spectrograph into the family!  GREAT STUFF EVERYONE 😁