News
SAM Sees First Light
August 6th, at about 9 pm, the SOAR Adaptive Module (SAM) saw first light: through heavy clouds, with terrible seeing to be sure, but it did its job and improved the quality of the images (of one of the brightest stars in the southern hemisphere!). SAM is a multi-year project, and this occasion marks a major milestone in its development; next year we will complete it with the addition of a laser guide star. The SAM instrument is a new kind of Adaptive Optics instrument which exploits Ground Layer Seeing Compensation. The project was proposed by Project Scientist Andrei Tokovinin and has been built by a large group of engineers in the CTIO Engineering and Technical Services division in La Serena. The photograph shows SAM being lifted up to its position on the Instrument Support Box (behind the operator) on the Optical Nasmyth platform of SOAR.
SOAR Postdoctoral Fellow
The Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) consortium invites applicants for a three-year postdoctoral fellow position at its facilities in Chile. The 4.1-m SOAR Telescope is a state-of-the-art observatory located on Cerro Pachón adjacent to Gemini-South. It is equipped with a large suite of instruments including the SOAR Optical Imager, the Spartan near IR camera, the OSIRIS near IR imager/spectrograph and the Goodman Optical Spectrograph. The SOAR Adaptive-optics module (SAM) a ground layer adaptive optics module and an IFU-fed optical spectrograph (SIFS) will be commissioned in the coming year, while it is anticipated that a high resolution optical spectrograph (STELES) will be delivered during 2011. SOAR is owned by a consortium, whose members are the Federative Republic of Brazil, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Michigan State University, and is operated on their behalf by NOAO.
New SOAR website
Over the past 2 months, 3 developers contributed to the new SOAR website using Plone. Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. The SOAR Website has seen a substantial increase in activity. This is a good sign that interest in this project is rising, and that the SOAR community has embraced this project.
Spartan IRC Arrives
The Spartan Infrared Camera (IRC) was delivered to the SOAR facility on Cerro Pachon on 7th October. Laboratory tests performed on arrival successfully reproduced the results of similar tests carried our prior to shipping, demonstrating that the instrument arrived in good condition. Thus all is ready for initial testing on the telescope, expected to begin in mid November.
SOAR Mirror Makes Another Journey
The SOAR primary mirror took another trip today, but this time only the 300m from the Gemini South Telescope where it was successfully aluminized on January 28, 2004 to its final resting place in the SOAR facility.
