Found 107 talks archived in Telescopes and instrumentation

The IAC is part of the  Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy (SARA), a consortium of colleges and universities in the US partnered with Lowell Observatory, the Chilean National Telescope Allocation Committee, and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.

In this seminar I will describe the remote facilities operated by the SARA observatories that comprise a 0.96m telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona; a 0.6m instrument on Cerro Tololo, Chile; and the 1m Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope at the ORM. All are operated using standard VNC or Radmin protocols communicating with on-site PCs. Remote operation offers considerable flexibility in scheduling, allowing long-term observational cadences difficult to achieve with classical observing at remote facilities. Multiple observers at different locations can share a telescope for training, educational use, or collaborative research programs. Each telescope has a CCD system for optical imaging, using thermoelectric cooling to avoid the need for frequent local service, and a second CCD for offset guiding. SARA Kitt Peak telescope also has a fiber-fed echelle spectrograph. Switching between imaging and spectroscopy is very rapid, so a night can easily accommodate mixed observing modes.

The IAC astronomers started to use SARA facilities since early 2016 and a new call for proposals is open. I will present some early results from IAC’s observational programs and discuss the present status of the facilities and the experience obtained by the IAC users that could help new potential observers to prepare their own proposals.

An exciting series of changes are taking place at the venerable WHT and INT on La Palma. WEAVE, the next generation multi-fibre spectrograph is being completed for the WHT prime focus. Once built, it will carry out massive surveys of stars, the Milky Way, galaxy evolution and cosmology. At the INT, the HARPS3 high-resolution stabilized spectrograph is being built. It will provide the ING communities with a world-class exoplanet research tool. This talk will address the observing opportunities brought by these two instruments, their development calendars, and ING’s plans to retain additional instrumentation for the open time. I will describe how the telescopes will be operated, both in the survey time and the open, TAC time.

In coincidence with the announcement of the call for proposal of the Spanish night CAT for semester 2017A, we present the new web page OOCC. This is the new astronomer portal of the IAC, and it targets the Spanish community with all the necessary information to access and observe with any telescope at both Observatorios Astronomicos de Canarias, that is the Observatorio del Teide and the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos. The new portal, developed by the IAC Telescope Operation Group in agreement with the Presidents of both the night and the solar CATs, supersedes the old www.iac.es/cat and www.iac.es/telescopes pages. In this talk we will present the most important aspects and possibilities of the portal.

I will summarize the two well proved techniques for high spatial resolution: Lucky Imaging and Adaptive Optics and the work of our group in this field. I will also introduce the state-of-the-art new instrument Adaptive Optics Lucky Imager (AOLI). On AOLI, both techniques merge providing a very versatile answer on the visible range. Some first science on the T-Tauri system LkHa 262/263 in the MBM 12 cloud will be reported together with a review of the next steps to be developed.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project intends to build a radio-interferometer with 1-sq-km collecting area, and thousands of antennas with baselines up to 3000 km, to be hosted in two continents (Africa and Oceania). This will provide tens of times more sensitivity and allow astronomers to survey the entire sky thousands of times faster than any system currently in existence, with the ability to image huge areas of sky in parallel.

Spain is actively participating in the SKA detailed design phase, both at a scientific and technological level. The potential of SKA for fundamental breakthroughs in Astrophysics, Physics, and Astrobiology has made that the Spanish SKA White Book has been published, with more than 125 authors who have summarized in 29 chapters the interest of the Spanish scientific community. At the same time, SKA constitutes a technology tractor for high-impact societal areas. Among the 100 companies and research institutions across 20 countries that are contributing to SKA design, 10 Spanish research centres and 11 companies participate in several work packages (Dishes, Signal & Data Transport, Central Signal Processor, Science Data Processor, Telescope Manager, and Infrastructure). This Spanish technological participation in the SKA, with an estimated financial value of ~€2M, has been officially acknowledged by the SKA Board. Since October 2013 a representative of the Spanish government has been regularly invited to participate in the SKA Board meetings. Furthermore, at the beginning of 2014, the Board of the Spanish Astronomy Infrastructures Network endorsed the recommendation issued by the Radio Astronomy Infrastructures working group on the interest of the scientific community and industry that Spain explores the possibility to join the SKA project as Full Memb er before the construction phase starts. The interest of the Spanish community and industry was restated during the SKA Spanish day held in October 2014 while a new SKA Spanish Industry Day will be organized by CDTI in 2016.

The aim of this talk is providing a retrospective view of the Spanish participation in SKA project and explain the current status of its participation and opportunities of involvement.

In this talk we will review  the SPICA mission and present its current status under the new framework. Optimized for mid- and far-infrared astronomy with a cryogenically cooled ~2.5m telescope, SPICA will achieve high spatial resolution and unprecedented sensitivity in this wavelength domain. It will enable to address fundamental problems in astrophysics ranging from the formation of planets to the star-formation history of the universe.

In collaboration with member states institutes, the use of the synergies with ESO is producing first important results in the R&D for Laser Guide Star adaptive optics, to be used for the large and extremely large telescope projects.

In this talk we will report on the preliminary results of the current campaign on LGS return flux with laser guide stars at Observatorio de el Teide and the foreseen tests of the EELT LGS-AO scheme, to be done at the WHT starting in summer 2016. An outlook will be given on the proposal for further feasibility tests at WHT in 2018-19, to experiment novel LGS-AO schemes using uplink beam correction and pyramid wavefront sensing. The demonstration is for a LGS-AO scheme giving high Strehl on the EELT and adaptive optics in the visible on 8m class telescopes.

The Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (hereafter OAJ) is a new Spanish astronomical facility devoted to carry out large sky multi-filter surveys with two telescopes of large field-of-view (FoV): the Javalambre Survey Telescope (JST), a 2.5m with 3deg FoV, and the Javalambre Auxiliary Survey Telescope (JAST), an 80cm with 2deg FoV. Both telescopes are equipped with panoramic cameras that amount to 1.3Gpix and are able to host more than 80 different filters simultaneously. During the first years of operation, the OAJ will be mostly devoted to conduct the Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey (J-PAS) and the Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS). J-PAS will observe 8.500deg2 of the sky visible from Javalambre with a set of 54 narrow-band contiguous optical filters plus 5 broader ones, performing in the end as a low resolution IFU of the Northern hemisphere. It will provide unprecedented spectral energy distributions for every pixel of the sky, and ultimately for more than 200 million galaxies. J-PLUS is now beginning to observe the same sky area of J-PAS with 12 narrow, intermediate and broad-band filters aimed to provide the photometric calibration of J-PAS and unprecedented multicolor data for many fields of the Astrophysics. Both J-PAS and J-PLUS will provide powerful 3D views of the Universe that will be made publicly available to the community as legacy projects. In this talk I will present the OAJ and the J-PAS and J-PLUS projects, describing the survey strategies and their main scientific objectives and capabilities.

ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, was formally dedicated on March 13, 2013. After an overview of the highlights of ALMA: Science drivers, characteristic parameters and observing modes, I will discuss some of the of the tools available to obtain images and spectra from the observations  --those you might propose and those already in the data archive. I will present a real-time demonstration of a quite generic reduction of an actual ALMA dataset obtained from the public archive, starting from the (ASDM) raw data to produce good quality, publishable images with a dynamic range that reaches ~1800 (on the strongest calibrator); although still limited by systematic effects.

CARMENES may find the first uncontrovertible exoearth in the habitable zone of a star in the solar neighbourhood. Its acronym, 'Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Échelle Spectrographs', is long but self-explanatory. After six years of hard design and construction, CARMENES is currently being commissioned at the German-Spanish 3.5 m Calar Alto telescope in Almería. Well in advance of its American, Japanese and Canadian-French competitors, it will be in January 2016 the first and only ultra-stable high-resolution spectrograph covering the red optical and near-infrared. As its co-project manager, I will give a summary of the homonymous CARMENES instrument, the international consortium that has built it, the on-going on-sky commissioning, and the science project that will be carried with it during guaranteed time observations.