MOONS lifted into place on the VLT — a breathtaking milestone at Paranal

Truly amazing footage has emerged as MOONS is lifted into the air and craned into its new home on the UT1 Telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. After years of hard work and dedication, MOONS has reached one of the final milestones on its remarkable journey — from concept, through construction at UK ATC in Edinburgh, to the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

This was the breathtaking moment when the 8-tonne MOONS cryostat was carefully hoisted into place, in close partnership with the ESO team. With the instrument now integrated with the UT1 Telescope, the next phase will see the team connecting all spectrograph fibres to the fibre positioners, with first light 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, Cambridge, coordinates the MOONROCCS Data Flow team and operates the computational infrastructure that will support the MOONS Guaranteed Time Observations surveys at the VLT — including the operational data repository, backend processing services, Level 1 and Level 2 pipelines, and Kubernetes-based services that move observations from raw frames to science-ready products.

With the instrument now on-sky, the CAMCEAD data systems stand ready to receive and process the first spectra from the 1000-fibre spectrograph, covering 0.64–1.8 µm across both Low Resolution (R~4000) and High Resolution (R~19,000) modes.