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Well, first of all, the first evaluation

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Images came in in the middle of the night but the team all came in and

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gathered, and we evaluated whether

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The camera was working well enough for us to proceed on with the alignment and

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as we analyzed those first photos, if you will,

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the team was pretty positive that the camera was working properly

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and the instrument was working properly

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so we picked a star that was very bright and didn’t have any

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stars near it that would contaminate the image. We know that the primary mirror

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segments aren’t aligned so they actually act like 18 separate telescopes

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And we expect to see 18 separate images, one for each

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mirror, that are a little bit blurry at this point because we haven’t

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aligned or focused anything. So we pointed at a bright star

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and we made a mosaic. We actually took the Near Infrared camera and we

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took images in different parts of the sky and then we looked

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for the 18 spots from the 18 different telescopes, if you will.

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and we were very excited to find them. The 18 spots were actually

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fairly close to each other so, really everything was very close to what was

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predicted. We’ve identified which of the 18 spots

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is which mirror. At this point we even know which ones are from

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the wings. And turns out one of the wings, you can actually see those 3 spots

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are a little farther over, and that’s sort of what we expected

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so, we’ve identified all 18 spots and the next step

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is to make an array of them. And then we are ready to start what we call

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global alignment. Which is when each of those 18 spots will start to be

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aligned and focused. And that’s sort of last step

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before we take those 18 spots and put them on top of each other to start forming

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a single star going through the 18 separate telescopes

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that’s the work we’ll be starting soon.

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We also took a “selfie” of the primary mirror. We took

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an image of the primary mirror and that helps us understand the alignment

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of the telescope, especially the primary mirror to the camera

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itself and the instruments. There’s actually a special lens in the Near Infrared camera

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that you can put in and it allow you to take a picture of the primary mirror itself

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and in this particular case, one of the segments is pointing at a

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star. So that is the segment that lights up but, you can see the outline

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through the shadows of all 18 segments. And you also can

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see the outline of what’s inside of the instrument itself, and we can see

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how well the primary mirror and the telescope is aligned to the instrument

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and that gives us some initial confidence that the alignment looks good

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and that’s a good starting point for doing the alignment of the telescope.

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We have now gotten some data looking through focus

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and we’ve been able to see that we don’t see any surprises

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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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