GRACES Repair Completed

GRACES sustained damages from a lightning strike in August of 2018 and the first run scheduled immediately after the strike was made possible, but only in limited mode. To recover full capability, CFHT’s Greg Barrick and Tom Benedict along with Gemini’s John White carried out repair work late last year. We are happy to announce that GRACES is now back in operation and obtained good data in excellent weather this January. It should be noted that since the repair all spectra are shifted by 15 pixels on the detector (towards the blue orders). Both Opera and DRAGraces software packages have been tested, and only the later needs to be edited to successfully extract new GRACES spectra. Stay tuned for a new DRAGraces release.