Well, first of all, the first evaluation
Images came in in the middle of the night but the team all came in and
gathered, and we evaluated whether
The camera was working well enough for us to proceed on with the alignment and
as we analyzed those first photos, if you will,
the team was pretty positive that the camera was working properly
and the instrument was working properly
so we picked a star that was very bright and didn’t have any
stars near it that would contaminate the image. We know that the primary mirror
segments aren’t aligned so they actually act like 18 separate telescopes
And we expect to see 18 separate images, one for each
mirror, that are a little bit blurry at this point because we haven’t
aligned or focused anything. So we pointed at a bright star
and we made a mosaic. We actually took the Near Infrared camera and we
took images in different parts of the sky and then we looked
for the 18 spots from the 18 different telescopes, if you will.
and we were very excited to find them. The 18 spots were actually
fairly close to each other so, really everything was very close to what was
predicted. We’ve identified which of the 18 spots
is which mirror. At this point we even know which ones are from
the wings. And turns out one of the wings, you can actually see those 3 spots
are a little farther over, and that’s sort of what we expected
so, we’ve identified all 18 spots and the next step
is to make an array of them. And then we are ready to start what we call
global alignment. Which is when each of those 18 spots will start to be
aligned and focused. And that’s sort of last step
before we take those 18 spots and put them on top of each other to start forming
a single star going through the 18 separate telescopes
that’s the work we’ll be starting soon.
We also took a “selfie” of the primary mirror. We took
an image of the primary mirror and that helps us understand the alignment
of the telescope, especially the primary mirror to the camera
itself and the instruments. There’s actually a special lens in the Near Infrared camera
that you can put in and it allow you to take a picture of the primary mirror itself
and in this particular case, one of the segments is pointing at a
star. So that is the segment that lights up but, you can see the outline
through the shadows of all 18 segments. And you also can
see the outline of what’s inside of the instrument itself, and we can see
how well the primary mirror and the telescope is aligned to the instrument
and that gives us some initial confidence that the alignment looks good
and that’s a good starting point for doing the alignment of the telescope.
We have now gotten some data looking through focus
and we’ve been able to see that we don’t see any surprises
in the shapes of the mirrors that we are looking at. So far so good but we do have a long way to go.
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