THE ING NEWSLETTER No. 2, March 2000
GENERAL SCIENCE TELESCOPES AND INSTRUMENTATION OTHER NEWS FROM ING TELESCOPE TIME
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Dr René Rutten. Director, INGDear Reader,
As I am writing this the Year 2000 (but not the new Millennium!) has just commenced. The telescopes passed their Y2K tests successfully well before the date change and no problems were experienced on January 1st. I hope the rest of the year will go as smoothly as that first night of the new year.
Last year 1999 ended with much excitement when in December the discovery by Andrew Collier-Cameron (St. Andrews) and co-workers of the Millennium Planet was announced to the press. For the first time ever the light of an extrasolar planet had been detected. The observations leading to this break-through were obtained with the Utrecht Echelle Spectrograph (UES) on the William Herschel Telescope.
The new year will bring many activities and exciting projects for ING. Most importantly, in a few months we hope to have the new IR camera, INGRID, operational on the WHT. Secondly, if all goes according to plan, this summer the Adaptive Optics system, NAOMI, will become operational on the WHT with the exciting prospect of delivering an image quality that will be measured in small fractions of an arcsecond. It will open a completely new toolbox for ING users, with hopefully many scientific discoveries to follow. Furthermore, ING's new Data Acquisition System, based upon the latest version of the San Diego controllers, will be rolled out to all foci of the WHT, and a new unit with narrow and continuous fibres for AUTOFIB should see first light in 2000. And last but not least further laser guide star trials will be carried out to complete the study of suitability of the skies above La Palma for sodium laser guide star deployment.
As you see ING and the various collaborating groups have a busy and exciting year ahead!
In the previous newsletter I reported on the negotiations that were taking place with Spain to seek collaboration between the ING and the Spanish 10-m telescope project GranTeCan. Regretfully, too many obstacles were encountered and both the Netherlands and the UK decided to withdraw from the negotiating table. A possible future collaboration is not wholly excluded, and hopefully scientific links and technical interests common to the GranTeCan and ING will develop into strong ties between our two organisations.
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