Target acquisition

One major issue in the use of FIES is the target acquisition which is done with the help of StanCam. An accurate positioning of the adapter pick-off mirror was made using the TCS needed to properly position the target on the fibers. A new clear filter was mounted in StanCam, for FIES target acquisition. This required the fiber head to be refocused on StanCam. The reason for installing the filter is that the refocusing currently needs to be done manually with the Cassegrain instrument dismounted, and in this way either a filter or `white-light' can be selected without the need to refocus. However, the focus will likely vary depending on things like the temperature which will still cause specifically the fiber entrance hole to be fuzzy and hard to see (in general, the fiber entrance holes are hard to see if the night sky is dark). Also, the fiber-aperture positions were measured on StanCam. These are needed for the software used to position stars in the fibers, and new `fiber viewing' script were made for the different fibers.

Two main things to consider are a system to allow remote focusing of the fiber head on StanCam and to further streamline/automate the whole target acquisition system.

Thomas Augusteijn 2006-12-04