It was another lovely day on Kitt Peak this afternoon, save for the clouds. 290 days of sun per year, and we had to get lucky enough to experience cloud cover. It's okay, there's still work to be done. We're currently letting the computer take some dome flats, which are images where we aim the telescope at a white sheet inside the dome, turn on some lights, and take short exposures. The goal is to create a series of exposures where we evenly illuminate the CCDs (make the image uniform or "flat") to correct for non-uniformity in the sensor and electronic read-out. Just another step in making nice, useful science images. Pending cloud cover, we may not get to open the dome tonight to take sky images, but maybe we'll get lucky. The forecast says we may get some clearing for a couple hours between 10pm-12am. On the plus side, tomorrow looks like it's going to be clear, still, and just perfect for imaging.
Additionally, we met some people (on the left in the red coat, Travis, from the University of Alaska, Anchorage) who are working just down the road from us at the 2m dome, on the spectrograph there. They took us over and gave us the semi-VIP tour of the spectrograph room, where the public certainly isn't allowed to go. Very cool machines over there, too. The whole room is one big, isolated instrument, where light enters through a little hole after bouncing around some mirrors outside. Below is a picture of the grating that spreads out the starlight into its rainbow for analysis.
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