TRES First light

TRES arrived on the mountain on 1 June 2007. After an intense 4 days and nights of tireless work, Gabor Furesz and Andy Szentgyorgyi brought the spectrograph to life on the 1.5m during the night of 5-6 June. The announcement below from Andy and Gabor says it all. Following further work to integrate TRES with the telescope over the next few months, we plan to conduct engineering and shared-risk observations in the Fall 07 trimester. TRES will replace the 1.5m Echelle the following trimester.

Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 11:48:45 -0400
From: Andrew Szentgyorgyi 

Dear Colleague:

Last night TRES saw first light. It appears to be working up to
expectation.The tip-tilt guide system performs well and the focal 
reducer produces good guide images. The spectrograph itself produces 
sharp spectra at the design resolution. The weather was not good, so 
conditions were far from photometric, but we acquired data on a 
spectrophotometric standard that will allow us to make a preliminary 
estimate of the spectrograph efficiency. I have attached some screen 
shots of the guide system imagery. The first shows the highly confused 
core of M3, while the second show the sharp round images the guide 
system produces.

Congratulations are due to the long list of contributors to this
project, all of whom were essential to the success we enjoy today. Our
special thanks to Mark Ordway, the TRES project engineer, whose
performance and level of dedication were always above and beyond the
call of duty.  For major contributions throughout the project, we
offer our profound thanks to Steve Amato, Kevin Bennett, Henry
Bergner, Mike Burke, Sue Demski-Hamelin, Tim Ellis, Roger Eng, Harland
Epps, Dan Fabricant, Bob Fata, Leslie Feldman, John Geary, Larry
Knowles, Csaba Major, Tim Norton, John Roll & Joe Zajac.

For their support at various phases of the project, we thank John 
Boczenowski, Pat Brennan, Flo Collette, Emilio Falco, Tom Gauron, Ted 
Groner, Bob Hutchins, Sylvain Korzennik, Brian McLeod & Wayne Peters.

Finally we thank Charles Alcock, Irwin Shapiro and Dave Latham for their 
encouragement and, perhaps more significantly, their financial support.

We look forward an exciting trimester of shared risk observation this fall.

Sincerely,

Gabor Furesz
Andrew Szentgyorgyi