Observatory life

First spectrum with HARPS. Live from La Silla

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Last image of the all sky camera. Sun is rising. See you tomorrow #palereddot !
Last image of the all sky camera. Sun is rising. See you tomorrow #palereddot !

[09:21:45] Alexandre Santerne: Thanks for following us ! End of the night. Time for astronomers observing #PaleRedDot to sleep.

[09:21:03] Guillem Anglada Escudé: anything you want to add to your audience?

[09:18:18] Guillem Anglada Escudé: ok. Yes. I’ll prepare a clean timeline later. Hopefully twitter comes back online so I can pull your text as well

[09:16:05] Alexandre Santerne: seeing during the observation: 1.3” – 1.4″

And the first spectrum!

First spectrum of PaleRedDot from HARPS. Looks promising!
First spectrum of PaleRedDot from HARPS. Looks promising!
Light going into HARPS as measured by its exposuremeter
Light going into HARPS as measured by its exposuremeter

[09:08:14] Guillem Anglada Escudé: yeah. Its good!

[09:08:04] Alexandre Santerne: snr@650nm = 65.3[09:07:46] Alexandre Santerne: exposition ended

The image on the right is Proxima on top of the optical fibre at the telescope focus. The same fibre goes all the way down to the spectrometer, which sits in the basement on top of the bedrock and lots of concrete

Integrating…

Control screen. The image on the right is Proxima centered on the optical fibre at the telescope.
Control screen. The image on the right is Proxima centered on the optical fibre at the telescope.

(not much to do for next 20 min, which is the exposure time…)

[08:49:51] Alexandre Santerne: flux level ~ 30%

[08:49:48] Guillem Anglada Escudé: cool

[08:46:41] Alexandre Santerne: exposure started

[08:46:36] Alexandre Santerne: focus ok

[08:43:07] Alexandre Santerne: checking focus

[08:39:31] Alexandre Santerne: pointing telescope …

UTC 08:38 Ambient of the ESO3.6m control room a few minutes before pointing #PaleRedDot

UTC 08:37. Two minutes to start pointing

UTC 08:32. Twitter is down (?!#@!) but we are still live on website! First spectrum in short. Go Alex!

Follow Alexandre Santerne @eso La Silla as the first spectrum of Proxima out of 60 is obtained.

Proxima rising at the end of the night

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Sunset of Jan 18th from la Silla

sunset_

2 thoughts on “First spectrum with HARPS. Live from La Silla”

    1. After processing the observations, it won’t take long if there indeed is something to be found. But to be honest, that’s pretty much as accurate as we can be at the moment.