We rushed up the hill this morning, eager to take blue images to check whether or not yesterday's efforts had killed the focus gradient. The Thorium Argon lamp was fed into one of the High Stability (HS) mode fibres... Out of focus arc lines appeared all over the place - but, crucially, they're uniformly out of focus over the whole chip: SUCCESS!!
After adjusting the focus we also tried feeding a halogen lamp into the other HS fibre so that we could get a continuum + arc lines in the same image - how cool...
We then spent a lot of time playing around making various adjustments on the optical bench in the tank, tweaking out minor aberrations & artefacts while establishing the optimal placement of the spectral orders.
It's been a tough few days up here, but now the sun's back out, the spring flowers have thawed & burst back to their pre-snow glory, &: we have a healthy blue camera again! Life Is Good :) We miss Eddy, but hopefully all's well with him in the Dubai airport...
While down in Cape Town, Luke collected a box of bits that'll keep us busy over the next couple of days. With a new stash of variously coloured LEDs & some bigger pinholes, we can get going on the throughput testing - thanks Ockert! & once that's done, we'll tackle the peaking up of the FIF stages since we now have the spare cables we need - thanks Geoff!
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