Observing at Magellan

I'm currently in the observing room of my favorite telescope, Magellan. It's good to be back in Chile again (this is my second trip this year, and my first trip to Magellan since last October). I will be taking spectra of red giant stars in star clusters of the Magellanic Clouds, in order to determine their chemical abundances. I'm using MIKE+Fibers, which is scheduled in a rather unique way. All MIKE+Fibers proposals are scheduled concurrently, and then the observers split the total block of observing time and execute a mini-queue to obtain everyone's data.

This is the third night of the MIKE+Fibers block, and my first night of observing. Right now, I'm just watching the other observers, remembering the ropes of the instrument. Probably tomorrow, I'll start actually pulling my weight.

Interesting non-science developments at LCO since my last visit: the observers' workstations are now Mac Mini's, rather than Linux boxen. And the Magellan kitchen now has an espresso machine (and there was much rejoicing).

I'll try to post some images of the telescope and instrument later.

UPDATE: Here are some images.

Hmm. I can't seem to get the image uploader to work, so here are *links* to images:

Here's a good overview shot of the MIKE+Fibers system. The whole assembly sits on the nasmyth platform of the telescope, the spectrograph itself is off to the left; it is connected to the telescope by hundreds of optical fibers (the red and blue cables), each of which will transmit the light from a single star in the focal plane of the telescope (off-image to the right) to the input slit of the spectrograph.

The fibers need to be placed very precisely in order to receive the light from stars (or galaxies) scattered across a particular field. This is achieved by designing plug-plates well in advance for a particular place in the sky. The plug-plate is a curved sheet of metal, like a large dinner plate. Hundreds of holes are drilled into the plate at the precise locations where the target stars will be when the telescope is positioned correctly. It's amazing that it works, but it really does. Here is an image showing a plate that has been plugged with fibers. The fibers need to be plugged into their holes manually; it takes about 30 minutes.