Astronomers and engineers are excited about the first light. One of the most recent and significant first light events took place at the Subaru Telescope. An upgrade to the NAOJ main telescope will allow it to simultaneously observe 2400 objects over a patch of sky the size of several moons.
The 2400 objects will be seen by the Prime Focus Spectrograph, which was developed by a dozen universities and companies on four continents. The prime focus instrument contains 2400 individual fibers and allows it to concentrate on different parts of the sky. The data from the fibers is fed to the SpS which analyzes it to produce the data used in scientific papers.
More than a human eye can take in alone, the SpS has four separate spectrographs that cover the spectrum from the ultraviolet to the near-IR. A press release from NAOJ puts it in a more poetic way.
Ryu Makiya is on the ESO (ASI AA) channel.
The Wide Field Corrector could potentially be used to capture rainbows. It is a seven-lens optical system developed specifically for this upgrade that allows the operators to correct errors before they become a problem.
The Metrology Camera System is used to track where the data are located. The data the system collects is thrown off if any are out of place.
The goal of the PFS upgrade is to understand where the universe came from and where it is headed. The Hyper Suprime-CAM will coordinate with it to reveal the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
The SCExAO YouTube channel has credit.
It will have a lot of data to analyze, but that is a lot for one telescope upgrade. The team might be able to put an eyepiece on the PFS before it starts collecting data. It's possible that the team that worked so hard could see some rainbows.
You can learn more.
There are 2400 new eyes on the sky.
The prime focus analyzer.
Astronomers found the farthest star. It took over 13 billion years for its light to reach us.
The telescope looks at 1800 supernovae.
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