Commissioning and First Light
August 2002:
UIST was successfully delivered to the UKIRT base in Hilo.
David Gostick unpacking the cryostat by cutting into the protection bag
The Team with the unpacked instrument
Instrument assembled and ready for the vacuum jacket
25th August
Cooldown is underway.
Aerial view of UIST cooling down
A close-up of the cooling instrument
30 August 2002
Acceptable array noise has been achieved and system is now warming up again.
2 September 2002
Flexure tests starting.
System being cranked to start internal flexure tests
UIST at 60° to test to internal flexures
4 September 2002
UIST successfully passes base testing and is packed for it's journey to the summit.
6 September 2002
UIST Arriving in safely at the summit and being unpacked.
Happy Team!
UIST is shown cabled and on the pump. All mechanisms have checked out warm
11 September 2002
The cryostat is now cooling and mechanism, array and internal alignment checks take pace tomorrow.
20 September 2002
UIST has now been successfully fitted to UKIRT and is 'ready to go'!
UIST installed on the telescope
Final mechanical checks
UIST fully installed and hanging below telescope
24 September 2002
Suzie is taking the first
data with UIST
The Team of the evening
of First Light
First Light Images
An image with the 0.12arcsec plate of the big bright nebula M17. It's a composite image in three filter (J=blue, H=green, K=red). You can pick out a couple of things straight away. The diagonal line running bottom-left to top-right is an interface where the starlight from all the hot new stars formed here is slamming into the gas cloud from which they formed. In the bottom left, where the majority of the blue emission is, the molecules in the cloud have been destroyed by the action of the starlight. Beyond that, the cloud remains intact. Some of the stars appear different colours, too. As a rule of thumb, the red ones are cooler and older, the blue ones hotter and younger. This is a well studied region, but the UIST image is still the best known, even though its was taken before the telscope was focussed! Image quality is consistent across the field, and matches the seeing on the night.
An active galactic nucleus (AGN). This image was made with the IFU, by adding up all the light in the spectra to produce a so-called 'white light' image. That's what you see in the solid background image. This shows the centre of the galaxy, which is known to house some powerful engine which interacts vigorous with the surrounding gas. Some of that gas is seen in the contour image - this is light from molecular hydrogen and just one of the wavelengths available in the IFU information. The H2 is located in a ring surrounding the nucleus and is bright because it is illuminated by the nucleus. These rings in AGN are well known to exist, but difficult to image because they are so close to the bring central emission. This is perfect work for the IFU. The ring was recently imaged using a slit spectrometer at the ESO 8-m telescopes. This image contains more information and was taken faster.