The security light was still producing a considerable
unwanted background so we came to an arrangement with the security company
and switched it off. Observing through the lab window severely limits what
we can look at but for testing there are plenty of suitable stars in the
small region we can get at. We aim to get to 11th magnitude or so but to
begin with we started with the brightest star accessible - Polaris
Observations were done from 11pm to 5am. We mainly used the time to accurately align the field of view of the finder, the guide scope and the IFU. Most of the observations were of Polaris.
The spectral image is shown below
and the extracted spectrum:
Preliminary measurements of the temperature stability of the system were made, using the position of the OH sky lines as a reference. Initial results suggest that the position of an OH sky line on the detector remains fixed to an accuracy of better than 0.04 pixels. This was measured for 2 1/2 hours of data and we intend to extend the result to the entire night next time we observe.