FLAMES is a fibre facility to be installed on the A platform of the VLT Kueyen telescope, which can feed up to three spectrographs with fibres positioned over a corrected 25 arcminutes Field of View. The initial configuration will include connections to the GIRAFFE and to the red arm of the UVES spectrographs, the latter, located on the Nasmyth B platform of the same telescope, is already in operation as a long slit stand alone instrument.1 The 8 fibres to UVES will give R'.-45OOO and a large spectral coverage (200 nm), while GIRAFFE will be fed by 132 single fibres (MEDUSA), or by 15 deployable integral field units (IFUs) or by one central large integral unit (ARGUS). GIRAFFE will be equipped with two gratings, giving R=5000-9000 and R=15000-25000 respectively. It will be possible to obtain GIRAFFE and UVES observations simultaneously. Special attention is paid to optimizing night operations and to providing appropriate data reduction.The instrument is rather complex and it is now in the construction phase; in addition to ESO, its realization has required the collaboration of several institutes grouped in 4 consortia.
We report in this paper on the design and progress of the ESO Laser Guide Star Facility. The project will create a user facility embedded in UT4, to produce in the Earth's Mesosphere Laser Guide Stars, which extend the sky coverage of Adaptive Optics systems on the VLT UT4 telescope. Embedded into the project are provisions for multiple LGS to cope with second generation MCAO instruments.The LGSF is designed, assembled and installed by ESO in collaboration with the MPE and Max-Planck Institut für Astronomie (MPIA) in Heidelberg. MPE/MPIA are responsible for the laser system, PARSEC (Paranal Artificial Reference Source for Extended Coverage), and for the LIDAR operation mode of the LGSF. ESO is responsible for the laser room, the laser beam relay, the laser beam launch telescope with servos, and all the diagnostic and safety measures. The LGSF becomes part of, and it is governed by, the UT4 Telescope Control System. LGSF has to adopt the VLT standards and to be retrofitted on the existing UT4 telescope.The LGSF has to be upgradable to produce and control 5 Laser Guide Stars for MCAO, in 2006. The current LGSF design already embeds provisions for this upgrade.In the design of the LGSF we take advantage of the field experience matured with the MPE/MPIA ALFA system, in Calar Alto. All design areas benefit from the ALFA experience, and the LGSF becomes truly a second generation Laser Guide Star Facility. The project was kicked-off in September 2000, and has reached the Preliminary Design Review milestone on April 2 nd , 2001. At this time we are progressing toward the Final Design Review. We report on the current design solutions and tradeoffs. * send offprints requests to: dbonacci@eso.org Downloaded From: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 06/14/2015 Terms of Use: http://spiedl.org/terms Proc. SPIE Vol. 4494 277 Downloaded From: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 06/14/2015 Terms of Use: http://spiedl.org/terms
We report on the ongoing VLT Laser Guide Star Facility project, which will allow the ESO UT4 telescope to produce an artificial reference star for the Adaptive Optics systems NAOS-CONICA and SINFONI. A custom developed dye laser producing >10W CW at 589nm is installed on-board of the UT4 telescope, then relayed by means of a single mode optical fiber behind the secondary mirror, where a 500mm diameter lightweight, f/1 launch telescope is projecting the laser beam at 90 km altitude. We described the design tradeoffs and provide some details of the chosen subsystems. This paper is an update including subsystems results, to be read together with our previous paper on LGSF design description 3 .
The ALMA Common Software (ACS) provides both an application framework and CORBA-based middleware for the distributed software system of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array. Building upon open-source tools such as the JacORB, TAO and OmniORB ORBs, ACS supports the development of component-based software in any of three languages: Java, C++ and Python. Now in its seventh major release, ACS has matured, both in its feature set as well as in its reliability and performance. However, it is only recently that the ALMA observatory's hardware and application software has reached a level at which it can exploit and challenge the infrastructure that ACS provides. In particular, the availability of an Antenna Test Facility(ATF) at the site of the Very Large Array in New Mexico has enabled us to exercise and test the still evolving end-to-end ALMA software under realistic conditions. The major focus of ACS, consequently, has shifted from the development of new features to consideration of how best to use those that already exist. Configuration details which could be neglected for the purpose of running unit tests or skeletal end-to-end simulations have turned out to be sensitive levers for achieving satisfactory performance in a real-world environment. Surprising behavior in some open-source tools has required us to choose between patching code that we did not write or addressing its deficiencies by implementing workarounds in our own software. We will discuss these and other aspects of our recent experience at the ATF and in simulation.
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