The Adventures of Zorro: Coming Soon to a Telescope Near You

Left - Zorro being assembled in the lab at NASA Ames; Right - first image of a test pattern prior to packing up for shipping to Chile.

'Alopeke and Zorro (Hawaiian and Spanish for "fox") are identical fast, low-noise, dual-channel and dual-plate-scale imagers based on the Differential Speckle Survey Instrument (Horch et al., 2009, 2012). 'Alopeke was delivered in 2017 and is permanently mounted on Gemini North as a Visiting Instrument. Zorro has just been built and will be installed on the calibration port at Gemini South in May 2019. In speckle mode, these instruments provide simultaneous two-color diffraction-limited optical imaging of targets as faint as V~17 over a 6.7 arcseconds field of view. Wide-field mode provides simultaneous two-color imaging in standard SDSS filters over a 60 arcseconds field of view.

Keep an eye out for Zorro in the next call for proposals, and see what this versatile instrument can do for you! The instrument team, led by Steve Howell (NASA), will take all observations and provide their standard pipeline-reduced speckle data products for all PIs. If you would like more help than this, the PI would appreciate an offer to collaborate. More information can be found here, and questions are always welcome!