During the last few weeks Gemini South has been affected by severe rain and snow storms, affecting the operations due to roads being affected and also the dome being covered in ice and snow. The last few days we have been closed fue to the snow and ice accumulating on the done and the summit crew has been working hard to remove ice and snow. Read more
La Serena was hit by a 8.4 earthquake last night at 19:54 local time, with epicenter 150km from La Serena. Fortunately the staff at the summit and all staff in La Serena are all fine. Read more
After nearly a decade of development, construction, and testing, the worlds most advanced instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets around other stars is pointing skyward and collecting light from distant worlds. The instrument, called the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), was designed, built, and optimized for imaging faint planets next to bright stars and probing their atmospheres. It will also be a powerful tool for studying dusty, planet-forming disks around young stars. It is the most advanced such instrument to be deployed on one of the worlds biggest telescopes the 8-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile. Read more
Revolutionary Instrument Delivers a Sharper Universe to Astronomers
Astronomers recently got their hands on Gemini Observatory's revolutionary new adaptive optics system, called GeMS. Robert Blum, Deputy Director of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, is currently using GeMS to study the environments in and around star clusters, and his preliminary data, targeting the spectacular cluster identified as RMC 136, are among a set of seven images released today. The remaining six images - spanning views of violent star-forming regions, to the graceful interaction of distant colliding galaxies - only hint at the diversity of cutting-edge research that GeMS enables. Read more
On February 3rd, while doing routine tests, we discovered what appeared to be vignetting in the FOV. Further inspection revealed the cause to be a major crack in the large collimator lens ("L1"). Read more
Revolutionary Instrument Propels Astronomical Imaging to New Extremes
On December 16, 2011, a decade of hard work culminated at the Gemini South telescope in Chile, when a next-generation adaptive optics (AO) system produced its first ultra-sharp wide field image. The first target image showed a portion of a dense cluster of stars called NGC 288. This first light image reveals details at nearly the theoretical limit of Gemini's large 8-meter mirror over an unprecedented large patch of the night sky. The crispness of the first-light image clearly demonstrates the potential of the system, which is poised to provide astronomers with a powerful new tool for the study of a wide range of phenomena: from black holes at the centers of galaxies to the life histories of stars. Called the Gemini Multi-conjugate adaptive optics System (GeMS for short), it uses five artificial guide stars made by a laser to provide extreme clarity over the largest area of night sky ever captured in a single AO observation - an area of the night sky which is 10 times larger than that covered by any other existing AO system in the world. Read more
Gemini Observatory invites its community to propose scientific investigations for the 2012A semester, 1 February 2012 - 31 July 2012. The Call is open to all partners. The submission deadline is FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 30 2011. Read more
GeMS First Light: A New Generation of Adaptive Optics Begins
In early April 2011, after more than a decade of effort, the Gemini Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics System (GeMS) saw starlight for the first time. With this milestone GeMS kicked off a new era in adaptive optics (AO) technologies both for Gemini and for future generations of even larger telescopes that will require advanced AO to make them scientifically viable. These first GeMS photons, captured on April 19, 2011, kept hopes high for equally successful progress when commissioning resumes in late 2011 and then for system verification in early 2012. Read more
The Gemini Planet Imager telescope is a pair of 8m telescopes, one in Hawaii and one in Chile. It delivers high contrast images of planets while they are in the vicinity of very bright star. Read more