GeminiFocus January 2020 | Page 20

the funding, and the design and build of NGS2 was primarily done by a team at the Australian National University in collaboration with Gemini engi- neers and astronomers. Without such a strong collaboration the project would not have prospered. Figure 5. A tense moment in the control room when all the AO loops were closed with NGS2 for the first time. Official first light on NGS2! Credit: René Rutten SCORPIO Making Steady Progress very quick, achieving a gain of several min- utes over the original NGS system for every acquisition (Figure 7). Figure 6 (bottom left). During the brief moments of good weather on the commissioning nights, the full MCAO system with NGS2 could be tested on the central condensation of stars in the Tarantula Nebula (RMC 136). Figure 7 (bottom right). NGS2 control panel, showing the field of view on the NGS2 EMCCD camera, and the identified three natural guide stars. Individual guide star window images are shown in real time on the bottom left. This system has proven to be much easier, faster, and better to operate. 18 A key driver for the NGS2 project was to work with fainter guide stars. Whereas the original NGS system could guide down to about R = 15.5 magnitude under good conditions, the new system has been proven to work even beyond R = 18 magnitude; a remarkable im- provement that significantly increases sky coverage, bringing many more objects into reach of the GeMS/GSAOI instrument. With the exciting build phase of the Spec- trograph and Camera for Observations of Rapid Phenomena in the Optical and Infra- red (SCORPIO) — a powerful next generation instrument for Gemini South — underway, the SCORPIO team has been busy in the last quarter of 2019. On November 22nd, Gemini staff and subcontractor FRACTAL attended the project’s Quarterly Review at the South- west Research Institute (SwRI) facilities in San Antonio, Texas. Gemini staff noted that significant progress has been made on sev- During the upcoming observing runs with GeMS/GSAOI, we will gain more experience on NGS2’s performance. We will update the web pages with the latest information for users. Meanwhile, we invite interested users to exploit the system with new and previ- ously inaccessible targets. The NGS2 project has been made possible thanks to the tight collaboration between many people. The initiative, a large part of GeminiFocus January 2020