SOAR Instrumentation News

Submitted by jelias on Fri, 2015-09-11 13:02

New Instrument Capabilities

Goodman HTS. Work on the Goodman Red Camera continues to progress, although final implementation has been delayed by final delivery of the camera electronics. We continue to expect that this capability will be fully available in 2016A, if not sooner. Once it is fully commissioned it will be offered to users who might benefit. The Goodman web pages will be updated once we have detailed information on performance with the new camera.
SIFS. SIFS re-integration is underway, with initial on-sky tests tentatively planned for late October. For SIFS, it is likely that we will schedule some time in 2016A for science verification; check back in November/December for an update.

Old Instruments

OSIRIS. At its September meeting, the Board adopted the following resolution:

"Starting in semester 2016B, OSIRIS will no longer be offered as an instrument on the SOAR telescope."

Users who are not already planning to make use of the new ARCOIRIS (ex-TSpect4) IR spectrograph on the Blanco telescope are strongly encouraged to examine its capabilities.

SOI. In principle, between them, the Goodman HTS imaging mode and SAM duplicate the capabilities of SOI. SOI could therefore be regarded as redundant, but we want to be very sure this is indeed the case before taking any action. In particular, if there are capabilities unique to SOI that are critical for particular science programs, we want to know about them.