Successful DSSI Observing Run

The visiting Differential Speckle Survey Instrument (DSSI) completed a successful 8-night run at Gemini North last month. The instrument team obtained data for their own programs and on behalf of astronomers from within the Gemini partnership. The team reports that most of the scheduled programs were completed and that the run was “amazingly productive,” resulting in diffraction-limited images as shown in the figure below.

The first image (greyscale) shows the asteroid Hebe which, according to DSSI team-member Elliott Horch, “...is clearly resolved showing its distinct non-round appearance. The scale of the whole image shown is only about 0.5 x 0.5 arcseconds across!" The Principal Investigator for this work is Bill Merline (Southwest Research Institute).

The second image (inset in the lower right corner) shows the star KOI 2626, a candidate exoplanet host (based on observations with NASA’s Kepler mission). According DSSI team-leader Steve Howell (and PI for this program), ”It shows that the host star actually is not single but has two companions, a slightly brighter one in the lower right and a slightly fainter one in the lower left. The separations from the central star are 0.2 and 0.16 arcseconds respectively. The reason it is a notable result is that the star is pretty faint -- 16th magnitude -- yet, with Gemini, we are still able to resolve these 17th-18th magnitude stars very close to the primary star.”