CIRPASS test observations - 15th Jan 2002
This was the first night the 8-inch Celestron (affectionately
dubbed the "Jiminy Telescope" due to its small size) was operated on the
night sky. The weather was good most of the night but we had problems with
background light from a high-intensity IR flood light (for the security
camera system) and dew forming on the front of the telescope. We successfully
demonstrated that we could acquire and track objects and beam-switch them
on the IFU. A key part of this process is the software to generate an IFU
image from the spectral data. This worked beautifully and images of how
the light was falling on the IfU were displayed within seconds of the data
being taken.
Data obtained
Initially relatively bright objects were used for aligning
the telescope with the instrument: an image of Jupiter on the IFU is shown
below
Exposures were taken of the same star at various positions
on the IFU, allowing us to "beam switch" the data. A beam switch of two
30 second exposures on Pollux is shown below:
The following spectrum is a combination of six of
these 30 second exposures on Pollux
Similarly for Arcturus:
And for Jupiter. The strong absorption longward
of 16200A is due to methane.
Andrew J Dean <ajd@ast.cam.ac.uk>
Ian Parry <irp@ast.cam.ac.uk>
Last modified: Wed Jan 23 15:13:55 2002