An intervention of Flamingos-2 is planned between January 3rd and 21st where the instrument will be offline. The following tasks are planned:

MOS wheel check and preventive work.
Replace the JH/HK spectroscopic filters with higher throughput ones.
Modify the Lyot wheel to allow the installation of the J-low and Y filters instead of the Hartmann masks.
Increase the number of layers in the dewars insulation, to allow more thermal stability.

After a successful realignment of its optics, the first Zorro run of the semester happened between Sept 16 and 22. Zorro has both cameras operative and waiting for proposals for 22A!

Zorro will be removed on Sept 1st for its optics realignment between Sept 8 to 10th. It will be installed back on the telescope between Sept 13 and 15th, and be ready before the Zorro run starting on the 16th.

The Zorro blue filter wheel, that had been faulty since last March, was successfully replaced last week. An unfortunate side-effect of the procedure is that the red and blue cameras are now misaligned by about 6 arcsecods, a shift bigger than the speckle field-of-view, which makes simultaneous observations with both cameras in speckle mode impossible. Both cameras are working fine, only independently. New PIs should therefore indicate which camera they want to use. Both cameras can still be used, but this will imply doubling the requested time.

The GHOST project continues to be on hold due to the pandemic and we do not expect to start the re-assembly and test of the instrument at Cerro Pachon this year.  We are hopeful that the travel restrictions will ease in the first half of 2022 so this work can begin. In the meantime, we continue to make incremental improvements to our software and documentation, and order spare parts.