MOONS lifted into place on the VLT at Paranal

New footage shows MOONS being lifted by crane onto UT1, one of the telescopes of ESO's Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile. It marks one of the last major steps for the instrument, which started as a concept, was built at the UK ATC in Edinburgh and has now arrived at the VLT after years of work.

Working closely with the ESO team, the crew lifted the 8-tonne MOONS cryostat into position. Now that the instrument is mounted on UT1, the next job is to connect all the spectrograph fibres to the fibre positioners. First light is expected in the coming months.

"Having more than a decade of work hanging in the air, in the middle of the Atacama desert, was a terrifyingly amazing experience for the team. Thanks to the extraordinary work of the whole MOONS team and our ESO colleagues, the instrument is now finally ready to open his eyes (938 of them) to the Universe."

Oscar A. Gonzalez, UK ATC Head of Science Strategy and MOONS UK Principal Investigator

CAMCEAD and the MOONS data system

The CAMCEAD group at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge coordinates the MOONROCCS Data Flow team. It runs the computing that will support the MOONS Guaranteed Time Observations surveys at the VLT: the operational data repository, the backend processing services, the Level 1 and Level 2 pipelines, and the Kubernetes services that take observations from raw frames to science-ready products.

Now that the instrument is on the telescope, the CAMCEAD data systems are ready for the first spectra from the 1,000-fibre spectrograph, which covers 0.64 to 1.8 µm in both its low-resolution (R ≈ 4,000) and high-resolution (R ≈ 19,000) modes.