SSO News
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue15 1–30 April 2021
Steve Lee’s last night
At 6am, on March 31st 2021, Steve Lee logged his final AAT night report. Here is a snippet from that report.
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A N G L O - A U S T R A L I A N T E L E S C O P E
D A I L Y B U L L E T I N
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UT DATE : 31/03/2021
NIGHT ASSISTANT : Steve Lee
SHIFT TECHNICIAN : John Goodyear
OBSERVERS : Montet, Vogrincic
TIME USED : 10:04
TIME LOST : 0:00
FAULTS : No faults reported.
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It was a good night; the skies were clear, there were no faults, and many Gb of data were obtained. Over the 40+ years that Steve has worked at the AAT, Steve has submitted about 4,000 AAT night reports.
We held an event in Coonabarabran a few weeks ago to farewell Steve. Kristin Fiegert, John Goodyear, Steve Chapman, Rob Dean, and Chris McCowage organised and ran the event. It was a great night, with over 50 people attending in person and an additional 20 attending online.
We thank Steve his excellent service over more than four decades, and wish Steve all the best in his retirement.
Welcome James Cameron
James Cameron is the new Operations Technician at SSO. He comes to the Observatory with a wealth of experience in IT, programming and electronics. In addition to maintaining the IT systems at SSO, James will also do night assisting.
We welcome James to SSO and we look forward to introducing James to all RSAA staff at the next school meeting.
Arrival of the Domes for GOTO-South
After a long trip from the US, the domes of the GOTO-South telescope have now safely arrived at SSO. The telescope is a twin of the telescope that is located in the northern hemisphere at the La Palma Observatory. It consists of a pair of wide-field instruments designed to rapidly cover the large areas of sky in a short period of time. UK funding was approved in late 2019 to fully develop the northern node at La Palma Observatory and to deploy a second instrument (GOTO-S) at SSO. GOTO is an international collaboration between the University of Warwick and Monash University. It is anticipated the full network will be operational by mid-2022, in time for the start of the 4th Advanced-LIGO/Virgo observing period.
The domes are being stored in the plant room of the ANU workshop for safe keeping. Once international travel is possible, the GOTO team will come to SSO to install and commission the telescope, which will be located between the APT and the ROSTE telescopes midway up the mountain.
A picture showing the GOTO domes being removed from the container in which they came, with Zach Smith ensuring that they are removed safely.
Chris Lidman on behalf of the team at SSO.
