Gemini South Earthquake Update

On the night of Saturday, January 19th, just as the GeMS team settled in to continue a highly successful observing run, a 6.7-magnitude earthquake hit just south of La Serena. The quake was quite deep (53 kilometers, almost the distance a crow would fly to get from the La Serena base facility to the observatory) but the shaking was violent. Systems at the summit behaved as they should, the secondary mirror powered itself off and observing came to a halt. After much hard work by the day crew on multiple systems the telescope is now ready for check-outs tonight (January 24th)!