Observing with the Keck's

[Quark]

Hi All,
Just got back from the Keck's, had a great time.
Had two nights on Keck II with Professor Duncan Forbes from Swinburne and one night with Professor Chuck Steidel from Caltech.
Have attached a few of my 260 images.

Regards
Trevor

[Dennis]

Now that is one ripper of a title for a post….

Cheers

Dennis

[AlexN]

Must be a magic place for an astronomer to visit... :)

Nice pics..

Dennis - Is it not one "keck" of a title??!! :) :whistle:

[h0ughy]

WOW what an honour and privilege - congratulations did they question you when you came back through customs with a scope like that in the suitcase?

[gary]

Hi Trevor,

Great to see you back, thanks for the pictures and looking forward to the
follow-up story!

Good to see you were sporting your fashionable IceInSpace beanie. Great product placement.

Best Regards

Gary

[astro_south]

Ummm...WOW!!!!!!

What a dream - congrats Trevor!

[iceman]

WOW! Speechless! Absolutely brilliant. I can't wait to see more pictures and hear more about it.

I'll PM you soon.

[Quark]

Hi Mike
I to was speechless, mere words seem totally inadequate to describe what I felt, that said I have attempted to put somthing on paper, I will post it as a word file. Here are some more images and my story. I hope it conveys to you all the effect being in such a place had on me, it sure is a long way from my observatory in Broken Hill to Mauna Kea and the Keck's.

Trevor

[iceman]

What a great write-up, thanks Trevor!

[rogerg]

Trevor,

Thanks for your write up and pictures - fascinating to read and look at. I haven't finished reading the document yet but will later tonight. I like it how they keep the scope's at night-time temp during the day, I wonder how much my power bill would go up if I tried doing the same with my tin obs during the summer :whistle:

I have read this thread a few times since you started it but haven't replied yet, trying to work out what to say.... I keep wanting to say how lucky you are to have had the Saturn recognition and then this Keck visit, but I don't believe in luck, it all comes down to choices made throughout life, directions taken and careful (or hap-hazard) planning. Congrats on being so successful! Something for many of us amateurs to aspire to.

I remember seeing your interview/segment on Catalyst and thinking "I bet that guy's on IIS and I just don't know it", and also hoping I'll get that kind of recognition some day as I slowly but surely move more in to the research side of amateur astronomy, trying to contribute what I can.

:thumbsup:

[Quark]

Hi Houghy,
The guy that showed us around was a Keck veteran, a really lovely bloke, Bill Henley, one of the places we went to was the area that houses the spare hexagonal mirror segments. Two of the attached images show these segments standing up on edge in cradles. There is a technician working on one of them, note the oxygen tubes connected to his nose. I sussed out Bill about taking one of the spare segments with me, to knock up a scope around it, but thought it might be a bit of a struggle as hand luggage on Qantas, apparently each segment is worth one million bucks.

Nice image of a very large and expensive infrared camera, makes the 450D seem pretty inadequate.

Trevor

PS The sixth image is from the tunnel below the Keck's and is of the apparartus that is used to connect the two telescopes and use them as an interferometer.

[Lester]

Astronomy "Heaven" Good on ya Trevor.

[h0ughy]

LOL Trevor, Mike will love that advertising at the KECK

[Kevnool]

Beautiful pics there Trev,I will listen to the ABC on monday and i will be at the college on the friday night......cheers Kev.

[iceman]

Any more photos, Trev?

[Quark]

Yep,
Still have lots more photos.

In order from the left,

Image 1 NASA Ifrared Telescope Facility 3-m (IRTF), Canada France Hawaii Telescope 3.6-m (CFHT), Gemini North Telescope 8-m, University of Hawaii 2.2-m Telescope.

Image 2 Mask machining room, the specialized milling machine is in the background. This is one of Prof Duncan Forbes PHD students, Caroline Foster from Quebec, she is holding one of the masks we would use on the DEIMOS spectrograph, NOTE the several square holes and slots. The square holes represent the positions of stars that will be used to align the required field, the slots are the positions of the Globular clusters that we would record the spectra from.

Image 3 Caltech Submillimetre Observatory 10.4-m dish (CSO)

Image 4 The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope 15-m submillimetre dish

Image 5 Subaru 8.2-m Telescope

Image 6 NASA Infrared Telescope Facility 3-m (IRTF)

Image 7 Smithsonian Submillimetre Array

Image 8 Canada France Hawaii Telescope 3.6-m (CFHT)

[Quark]

From Keck HQ Waimea

Image 1 W.M.Keck HQ Waimea at 3000ft

Image 2 The Keck HQ complex houses accomodation for visiting astronomers, remote control rooms for Keck I and Keck II, offices etc, it is quite a large complex with a courtyard in the centre.

Image 3 The entrance to Keck HQ, they carry over the hexagonal theme throughout the facility.

Image 4 In the foyer.

Image 5 In the foyer, the lawn behind me out in the courtyard is hexagonal and is the same size as the Keck primary mirror.

Image 6 Our group from Swinburne, from the left, Post doc Dr Sarah Brough, Phd student Caroline Foster, Swin Alumini Mike McDowell, myself, Phd student Max Spolaor, Swin Alumni Prof Marcus Wigan, Swin Alumni Dr Errol Malta, our team leader Prof Duncan Forbes.

Image 7 Our first observing night at the controls of Keck II

Image 8 Duncan with the DIEMOS controls, he is smiling but the satellite image on the screen behind him tells a woeful story. The red region, the worst weather, was parked directly above Mauna Kea.

[Quark]

Image 1 Image 2 and Image 3 are the control screens for the DEIMOS spectrograph

Image 4 the DEIMOS controls and telescope controls, although we did not observe due to the weather DEIMOS was calibrated early in the evening using the artificial lighting in the observatory. At the end of the night I got to shut DEIMOS down, reading the procedure off of one screen and applying the commands to another.

Image 5 This is Prof Chuck Steidel from Caltech in the Keck I remote control room, Chuck kindly invited me along for a third nights observing with him. This night was clear as, all night with 0.6 arcsecond seeing. In this image Keck I is online and data is streaming in. The screen in the top left shows the Tech assistant at the summit, she also sees us. The three screens in front of Chuck is where it is all happening.

The screen on the left shows the configuration of Keck I diagrammatically, with the beam splitter sending data to an imager or the spectrograph. Top right of this screen shows the star field that the guiding camera is looking at, there is a box drawn around the star that is being used to track with.

The central screen shows the Quasar at 10 billion l/y that Chuck is imaging.
The screen on the right shows the mask that Chuck is using on the spectrograph. He was hoping to use the continuum of the Quasar to detect foreground Lyman Alpha clouds.

Image 6 as for previous image, note in the central and right hand screens the blue bar filling horizontally across the screen, this indicates how far through the 30 min integrations of the red and blue wavelength we are.

Image 7 The central and right hand screens now show the results of the first 30 min integrations with the spectra shown horizontally in the central screen and vertically in the right hand screen.

Image 8 This is the telescope control screen, note the three green lights in the lower left quarter of the screen. The previous two nights on Keck II with Duncan's team those lights were red all night, which meant the dome could not be opened.

[rogerg]

More fascinating photo's, thanks for posting them :thumbsup:

A stupid question for you, do you know if they have to do a star alignment each night or on a regular basis at all? Or is the telescope so accurate that it simply always knows exactly where it's pointing all the time?

Roger.

[Quark]

Good question, honestly, I don't know, they do use an imager that looks at part of the field and tracks on a star in that field. Listening to Chuck, the tracking is not that great. When moving relatively small distances from field to field, the target was often out by a large enough amount to cause him some concern.

Trevor

[Bassnut]

Wow, awesome Trevor. The CNC mask machine was a shock, how is that used (OK it makes masks, but how are they used, and why?, please expand the explanation on the pic)

[Quark]

Bill Healy, the Keck guy that took us through the observatory told us that milling the masks was a specialist job and just the one guy does it, he does nothing else but the masks. I had a good look at the miller and obviously the tool that was in it was tiny and would have run at relatively high RPM.

There are several different spectrograph's available to visiting astronomers, they are capable of observing multiple targets simultaneously.
For Duncan's team the slots were for multiple globular clusters associated with four different galaxies. I think they use images of each field to design that particular mask, to determine the positioning of the slots to obtain spectra and the cutouts for the alignment stars in that field.

I am unsure of the design characteristics of DEIMOS, regarding how the light from the individual targets is directed, not sure if it is by fibre optic or not.

The masks are made from aluminum sheet and I also was surprised that they were milled. The slots need to be very accurate with no burs.

Much of the equipment at the observatory is original so is about 15 yrs old , funding for astronomy, like science in general is a bit of a problem.

Regards
Trevor

[Bassnut]

Fascinating, thanks Trevor.

[iceman]

Thanks heaps for the further reports and pics, Trevor. Not quite as good as being there but as close as I'm gonna get :)