SOAR first glimmer

SOAR Project Engineer Victor Krabbendam perches on one of the Bent Cass mass simulators in order to acquire the first star through a finder mounted on the auxiliary telescope, a Meade LX200. The finder was needed only once. Having established the initial zero point, blind pointing was good enough even before determining a pointing model to place targets near the center of the field of the S-BIG CCD (controlled by Steve Heathcote) mounted on a second finder, and centered in the main telescope. For more details, see the December 2002 NOAO Newsletter (currently only available in PDF format). The SOAR (SOuthern Astrophysical Research) telescope is operated by a consortium of universities and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, on Cerro Pachon in Chile.