First light

[Tom Love]

This has been a long time coming. I have been constructing a 50cm telescope in a dome, and tonight I managed my first spectrum.

The telescope is a 50cm f/4 prime focus design - the simplest possible telescope - using a lightweight mirror from Teleskop Express. Prime focus means no secondary, so it's one less surface to lose photons, attract condensation and to deal with in collimation. The truss assembly, spider, mirror mount and alt-az fork were made by a local engineering firm to my specifications using friction drives taken from a Mesu mount (which perform impeccably): http://www.mesu-optics.nl/mesu200_en.html The focuser and rotator are from PrimaLuce Lab.

This evening I used an Alpy for a spectrum of the recent nova in Vela. I fitted it with a 35 micron slit to maintain efficiency at longer focal length in typical seeing conditions, but the tradeoff is that the resolution drops to around R~450. Which is still good enough for transient classification and monitoring. The task over the coming months will be to explore the magnitude limit of the setup.

I will also be using a Lhires (with a few modifications) on this telescope.

There is some distance yet to go before I have a smooth production line for data with this equipment, but the first spectrum is an important step. And a relief finally to have got some actual data after several years of working towards this.