August 26, 2019

The northern hemisphere autumn saw multiple team members travel from Australia, Chile, and Hawai’i to converge on Victoria, British Columbia, at the NRC-H labs, to witness the completion of the spectrograph final assembly, and initiate acceptance testing. The Australian team bought along their science fiber optical cable and the slit viewer subassembly to be matched with the bench spectrograph for the testing.

Bonding and mounting of the GHOST optics is well underway at the National Research Council of Canada, and both blue 4k × 4k and red 6k × 6k science detectors are assembled into their cryostats, ready to be tested.

Arriving at Gemini South is the first part of our new instrument "GHOST".  The instrument consists of a unit mounted in the Instrument Support Structure in charge of 'capturing' the light of the telescope.  The spectrograph will be installed in the pierlab connected by over 80 feet (24 m) of cable.

The build of the GHOST Cassegrain unit is nearly complete. In November, Gemini staff participated in weighing and inspecting the fully assembled unit at Australian Astronomical Optics (AAO) at Macquarie University lab in North Ryde, New South Wales. The unit is currently on its way to Chile. In December, Gemini representatives spent a week at the AAO testing the Integral Filed Unit (IFU) positioner and verifying the assembly and operation of the electronics and software of the Cassegrain Unit.

New GMOS-N B600 Grating Available

A new B600 grating has been commissioned and is available for science use in GMOS-N. This grating replaces the original B600 grating which was damaged in December 2008. Active programs that are configured to use the original B600 grating will automatically use this new grating for any new observations executed.