Sea-level time

OK, things are not working properly yet, but still it's sea-level time :) The red-channel is now commisionned, after the correction of a small tilt of the micro-lens array. But there's still plenty of things to do for the coming nights: of course, the guiding and acquisition, the astrometry of the photometric and spectrographic channels, the confocality and so on. On the software side, the online seems to be late... But the 3D data-reduction is mostly ready, here is my first reconstructed image of a star (obviously out of the field-of-view!):

First reconstructed image from SNIFS!

Not very impressive, uh, but I am nonetheless a happy man!

Snifs is completed

Snifs is now completed... but unfortunately not running yet. There are still some optical alignements to be fine tuned, the infamous Cam I is again off, some PCs are a bit sick, the control soft is shakky, etc. But everything is under control :)

So here is the long awaited picture of Snifs on the telescope (at zenith):

OK, not as beautiful as Sauron, but still fine...

First image of the multi-filter!

Tonight is the imaging night! Richard is at the summit, seconded by Greg at Hilo, and they're playing with the photometric channel to get the guiding working.

And here is the first (dome) image of the multi-filter:

Congrats!

Here I am!

After two days of flights, stops at Frankfurt, Charlotte NC, Los Angeles LA, here I am on Big Island, right in UH dome, looking at the mechanicians plugging some new unexpected devices to the telescope... I must admit 12h jet-lag and 4200m altitude doesn't help for the understanding of all the details.

Not sure we'll have access to the telescope in the coming hours, and not sure I'll be able to do anything except snoring after that. But Manu(s) and Blandine are ready to jump on the first exposure.

A little picture (note the shadow of the Mauna Kea on the clouds):

The same, but for Arlette: