Instrument Announcements

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GNIRS camera turret locked at Short Blue

April 22nd, 2024

In early April 2024, the GNIRS camera turret experienced a mechanical issue​, ​likely due to the dragging of a bearing that helps drive the movement of the turret. It has been assessed that GNIRS could no longer reliably shift between its long and short cameras​. ​A soft lock on the camera turret ​has been put in place, which fix​es the​ location of the turret to the short blue camera.

GNIRS detector degraded performance

January 31st, 2024

GNIRS recently began showing an issue that affects every 8th column on the top right quadrant of the detector, an issue that impacts all GNIRS modes. This issue first appeared on the 25th of October, 2022. Investigations to mitigate or fix the issue are currently ongoing. For the time being, PIs are advised to consider all pixels associated with these columns as bad pixels and not to use them for science and/or calibrations.

GMOS-S Back On Sky for Recommissioning

January 12th, 2024

After the successful upgrade of two of the three GMOS-S CCDs, the instrument is back on the telescope and undergoing recommissioning. The long-slit mode has been released for taking science data. However, updates for the data reduction packages in IRAF and DRAGONS are pending testing after the full commissioning data set has been collected and will likely not be available until the May/June timeframe.

GMOS-S upcoming intervention

July 18th, 2023

GMOS-S will be removed from the telescope on Friday, July 21st for the CCDs intervention, with the purpose of replacing the faulty CCD2.
The instrument is scheduled to come back during late August for the commissioning of the upgraded detector array, and expected to be available for Science by September.
 

GMOS-N B600 PIs are encouraged to use B480 grating

June 16th, 2023

The GMOS-N B600 grating sensitivity has recently degraded significantly. This overall degradation is in addition to the blue sensitivity loss reported previously. Since the new B480 grating is now available for GMOS-N, we recommend changing B600 programs to the B480 grating. The B480 grating offers a wider wavelength coverage than B600 at a a slightly reduced spectral resolution.

First pipeline reduced GHOST observations & available data

June 9th, 2023

We are pleased to present the first GHOST science observations that have been reduced with the GHOST pipeline. We are releasing the spectrum of XX Oph (Be + Red Supergiant; V= 8.59-10.2 mag) as an example to showcase the spectral range, spectral resolution, and overall quality of data that GHOST can provide in standard resolution mode (R=50000; with a total integration time of 240s, and a wavelength range of 347 to 1060nm).

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