AIP astronomy picture of the month

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PMAS at the Calar Alto 3.5m Telescope. The picture was taken during the balancing procedure which was completed routinely like with any standard CAHA instrument.
( credit: M.M. Roth AIP)

Reason for selection:

First Light for PMAS at the Calar Alto 3.5m Telescope

During 3 nights of service time on May 28-31, 2001, the PMAS instrument was mounted at the 3.5m Telescope of Calar Alto Observatory in Southern Spain, experiencing its first test at the telescope.

The main purpose of this commissioning run was to provide and test the optical alignment with the telescope, to test all opto-mechanical, electronic and software interfaces, balancing, stability tests, and generally operation under real observing conditions.

After completion of the alignment and integration procedure, it was possible to fully use 2 nights of observing with essentially zero down-time due to technical failures, despite the limited capabilities of the provisional test configuration, involving a lab prototype fiber bundle, a single engineering grade CCD (instead of the final design 4Kx4K mosaic), and a provisional version of the instrument control software.

The whole campaign went remarkably well, confirming successfully the results from previous lab tests at the AIP telescope simulator.

PMAS, the Potsdam Multi-Aperture Spectrophotometer, is a novel integral field spectrograph which is being developed at AIP. The project is funded jointly by the Verbundforschung of BMBF, and by AIP.

For more details, see http://www.aip.de:8080/groups/opti/mmr/OptI_pmas.html

( credit: M.M. Roth AIP)