Siding Spring Observatory Director's Update
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue69 1–28 February 2026
Nearly three months after the end-of-year lunations there is much to report about Siding Spring Observatory. In December, Glen Murphy received the Siding Spring Observatory Award for Service in recognition of his dedication and leadership in the mechanical team. Another award went to the organising team for StarFest 2025, led by Zoe Holcombe and Sharna Persson for their outstanding delivery.
In mid-February, a Working-at-heights course was held on site. Instead of travelling to Dubbo, nine SSO staff members received exciting training inside the AAT dome. There is, unfortunately, no photographic evidence of anyone dangling in mid-air, but training of this variety is required regularly given the work that is sometimes carried out in the tall dome.
The AAT and its beautiful surroundings keep attracting artists. On 18 February, Matthew Cook from the Byron Bay area created a large-scale painting of the Warrumbungles on a canvas spread over the full-size mirror dummy outside the AAT dome (see photo). He plans to enter this into a regional art contest in Sydney later this year.
On the technical side, after a 7-year journey, the leaking LN2 cans that provide cooling to the AAOmega spectrograph at the AAT were finally fixed, when the culprit, Indium seals, was identified.
Important dates for RSAA researchers: the ANU 2.3m telescope will be out of service for a good week from 29 March onwards to allow repairing the foundations of the rails on which the building rotates. This telescope used a highly innovative design since before the ESO NTT and VLTs were operational and has been turning on its rails for 42 years now.
Finally, on 25 February, the 10-year LSST project at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile launched its alert stream, focussed on the Deep Drilling Fields for the start. This stream is digested by the FINK broker developed by a team around former RSAA post-doc Anais Möller, and selected alerts feed the SSO transient factory, triggering spectroscopic follow-up at the ANU 2.3m telescope. Two requests were sent last night, although the weather was not good enough for the telescope to observe them. If data had been taken, it would have been processed automatically, and spectra for the brightest object would have been extracted.
Image: The Warrumbungles painted by Matthew Cook outside of the AAT
