GMOS Hot News

GMOS science observations during semester 2001B and current GMOS status

14 March 2002

During the semester 2001B GMOS was successfully commissioned and System Verification observations were carried out for the imaging, the longslit and the MOS mode. The System Verification data for these modes will become public later this year.

In October 2001 we started the pre-imaging for the MOS queue programs, and during November, December and January, we entered regular science operations for imaging, longslit and MOS mode. Even though the weather in the last part of the semester, especially December 2001 and January 2002 was not very cooperative, we succeeded in completing a large number of the programs in ranking bands 1 and 2. In total, data were obtained for 14 different queue programs. The data have now been sent to the PIs. (See the 2001B queue summary for details).

The Gemini IRAF package V1.3 has been released. This version includes the reduction tasks for processing of GMOS data. More reduction tasks for GMOS data are still under development, especially tasks to handle the IFU data.

Semester 2002A was started by commissioning GMOS on the side-looking port of the telescope, after the instrument had spent all of last semester on the up-looking port. This commissioning task went very smoothly and on the 4th night of that run we started on the queue observations for semester 2002A. Early in this semester we also plan to carry out the System Verification observations for the IFU mode, most of which require better image quality than the weather has given us recently. Once the System Verification observations for that mode have been completed, we also hope to carry out IFU observations from the queue.

Last update March 14 2002; Inger Jørgensen