English (UK)
We start a series of short pieces of news related to the imminent arrival to Calar Alto of CARMENES, the new Observatory’s exoplanet hunter. In plain English, it is a “machine to discover planets like our Earth around the most abundant (and, also, the closest, smallest and coolest) stars”. For the astronomers, it is a highly-stabilised, fibre-fed, double-channel, high-resolution spectrograph at the Zeiss 3.5 m telescope that will cover in one shot a wide spectral range from 550 to 1700 nm. Each channel will observe a spectral region: VIS in the optical and NIR in the near-infrared, with a beam splitter at 950 nm. CARMENES is especially designed for performing high-accuracy radial-velocity measurements of the brightest, latest, single M dwarfs of the solar neighbourhood, but can also be used for many other purposes.
Currently, CARMENES is in the assembly, integration and verification phase (that is, the last phase of construction) and some elements are already finished or are being shipped to Calar Alto. The first main component to arrive the Observatory, in early March 2015, will be the front-end at the Cassegrain focus. In the meantime, at the Observatory, we are refurbishing the coudé room of the 3.5 m telescope and preparing the ethernet network for CARMENES. The network will connect a dozen CARMENES computers with the rest of telescope systems, controllers, power distribution units and reamining electronic devices of our complicated instrument.
We decided to christen the computers with the names of famous “classical” astronomers that have contributed significantly to the discovery of M dwarfs, the type of stars that CARMENES will monitor most. As a result, we use the name luyten (W. J. Luyten) for the laboratory Instrument Control System (ICS) computer in the control room, gliese (W. Gliese) and jahreiss (H. Jahreiss) for ICS One and ICS Two in the main rack, kapteyn (J. C. Kapteyn) for the laboratory pipeline computer in the control room, lalande (J. J. L. de Lalande) and barnard (E. E. Barnard) for NIR and VIS pipeline in the main rack, ross (F. E. Ross) for the main and spare NIR computers in the NIR rack, wolf (M. Wolf) for the main and spare VIS computers in the VIS rack, giclas (H. L. Giclas) for the acquisition and guiding computer attached to the front-end, and struve (O. Struve) for the interlocks panel. Besides, we use the name vb (G. A. van Biesbroeck) for the archive computer at the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid, outside Calar Alto. If you are an astronomer, it is very likely that you have heard of the Luyten’s (M3.5V), Barnard’s (M4.0V) and Kapteyn’s (sdM1.0) stars, Wolf 359 (M6.0V), Lalande 21185 (M2.0V), Luyten 726-8 (M5.5V SB2), Ross 154 (M3.0V), Struve 2398 A and B (M3.0V and M3.5V), Gliese & Jahreiss 1061 (M5.0V) or van Biesbroeck 10 (M8.0V), which are among the nearest catalogued stars.
More information at http://carmenes.caha.es/
The German-Spanish Calar Alto Observatory is located at Sierra de los Filabres, north of Almería (Andalucía, Spain). It is jointly operated by the Instituto Max Planck de Astronomía in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC) in Granada, Spain. Calar Alto has three telescopes with apertures of 1.23m, 2.2m and 3.5m. A 1.5m aperture telescope, also located at the mountain, is operated under control of the Observatorio de Madrid.
COMMUNICATION – CALAR ALTO OBSERVATORY
