Jennifer Lotz
Director’s Message
Riding the Waves to New Heights at Gemini
It’s been an interesting few months at Gemini, especially between facing the challenges of the
US government shutdown and a significant earthquake in Chile. We’ve also interacted with the
community at the American Astronomical Society and Korean User meetings, while making
continued progress on adaptive optics (AO), time-domain astronomy, and visiting instrument
initiatives.
Despite the ups and downs of the past few months, Gemini Observatory and our users have
continued to collect photons and produce amazing science, as evidenced in Science Highlights
starting on page 8 of this issue. With Gemini, astronomers have confirmed the age and distance
of one of the oldest star clusters in our Galaxy; measured the size of the trans-Neptunian object
Varth, and calculated the mass of the brightest quasar detected at a redshift greater than 5.
On January 19th, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake (with an epicenter just 60 kilometers southwest
of Cerro Pachón) rocked Gemini South. This major shake-up occurred during a GeMS/GSAOI
run, with a number of staff on the summit running the multi-conjugate adaptive optics laser
system. Fortunately, we had no injuries at the summit or La Serena Base Facility. Gemini engi-
neering and base facility leads responded very quickly and found no major damage at either
site. The engineering team also completed a systematic evaluation of the telescope and found
that the earthquake had affected several actuators on the primary mirror, which they success-
fully replaced. Thanks to our efficient team, Gemini South was back on sky, making science
observations just five days after the earthquake. On March 13th, Gemini North experienced
its own 5.5-magnitude earthquake, ceasing telescope operations for the night. After a similar
checkout by the day crew, Gemini North was up and running the next night.
In February, I was able to visit Korea for the first time to attend the K-GMT Program Users Meet-
ing, which was held over two and a half days at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute
(KASI) in Daejeon. The event featured many fabulous talks by the Korean astronomy commu-
nity. I was particularly impressed by the excellent student presentations. Korean astronomers
have been conducting exciting research at both at both Gemini and the Multi-Mirror Telescope
April 2019
GeminiFocus
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