Arriving at Gemini South is the first part of our new instrument "GHOST". The instrument consists of a unit mounted in the Instrument Support Structure in charge of 'capturing' the light of the telescope. The spectrograph will be installed in the pierlab connected by over 80 feet (24 m) of cable.
Australian Astronomical Optics at Macquarie University designed and built the Cassegrain unit, with software design coming from the Australian National University. Members of each organization traveled from Australia to Cerro Pachón to unpack, assemble, and test the unit with critical support from the Gemini South day crew, and from Gabriel Perez, Eduardo Toro, Cristian Urrutia, Steve Margheim, John Bassett, and David Henderson. The unit was then prepared and installed on the telescope to make the first checks on sky in early February.
The team had a very successful first night of testing. The instrument performed very well. A few of the accomplishments of the evening were confirming the coordinate systems and field center of GHOST are aligned within our measurements, and the probe map of the positioners is well behaved. The team were also able to map the coordinate systems to the sky and acquire targets repeated over the entire 7 arcmin FOV, and verify that target acquisition, both direct and via spiral search were working as expected in both the single target and two target modes. The team was enthusiastic about the performance of the GHOST unit and now await the arrival of the spectrograph from National Research Council Canada.