News 

1. 26 July 2023 - Veloce achieved first light for the full 3-camera system tonight. The image below (thanks to Gayandhi de Silva!) shows data from a star being captured all the way from 390-930nm. The green camera throughput looks very good, with the red part of the green camera collecting a significantly higher photon flux than the blue part of the red camera. Fibre throughput is an issue in the blue camera short of 400nm (as expected) though some photons seem to make it through down to 390nm.
   
   

   

   
   
   Updated throughput estimates and S/N for the various cameras will be provided as soon as I can process the data taken on the first few nights.
   
2. 18 July 2023 - The first 5 night commissioning run for the full Veloce Rosso+Verde+Azzurro system took place on June 28 - July 2. Sadly, the dome never opened. However, we were able to complete optical re-alignment for Rosso, and alignment for Verde. Azzurro performance image quaity was a bit poorer than expected, so a second trip Jul 11-12 involved more adjustment, and the Azzurro performance is not greatly improved.
   
   The ESO NGC controllers, and integration with the DARAMA VCT and vq observing system, has so far performed flawlessly. Seeing all three detectors read with noise < 3.5e- and largely featureless bias frames has been impressive.
   
   A second commissioning run is scheduled Jul 26-31, to be followed by Community Science Verification Aug 24-30 - see the link if you’d like to acquire some data of your favorite class of object with the new full-wavelength coverage Veloce.
   
   The Veloce Observing Guide and Instrument Manual is being continuously updated as we work through commissioning.
   
   

   

   
   
   
3. 14 June 2023 - Integration at the AAT. Over the last 3 weeks the two new optical cameras (and their detectors, plus the Rosso detector (in its new dewar) have been installed at the AAT. The pretty picture below shows the new system illuminated by a bright light during alignment.
   
   

   

   
   
   More informative is the following image of the two new cameras integrated into the existing spectrograph. The two black cylindrical barrels at the front (each with a silver cylinder attached) are the Verde and Azzurro cameras with their dewar attached. The rectangular box art the rear is the existing Rosso camera, with its new silvery dewar attached. (The ‘box-like’ unit to the right is the echelle grating and its collimators - they feed dispersed light to all three cameras).
   
   

   

   
   
   Fine adjustment of the optics is taking place now to (a) ensure the Rosso echellogram has the same positioning as previously, followed by (b) focus and rotation of the Verde echellogram, and then (c) focus and location of the Azzurro echellogram.
   
   We already have test images of the LC spots on the Verde camera, delivering calibration all the way from 600nm to 450nm in that camera!
   
4. 23 Mar 2023 - We found the leak! For the last few years, the Veloce Rosso cryostat has suffered from a slow leak that could not be found. This required pumping the dewar every fortnight, and resulted in small shifts of the echellogram on the detector. However, removing the dewar to send to RSAA as part of the Veloce Verde+Azzurro upgrade allowed individual testing. The dewar was found to be fine, and the leak was in the pipework between the cryostat and the vacuum pump. The defective part has been found and binned!
   
   In other news, an engineering detector has been installed into the Azzurro cryostat ...
   
   

   

   
   ... and the Azzurro optics has been assembled and is being tested.
   
   

   

   
   
   

5. 23 Feb 2022 - Website is live again! A few MacOS versions ago, Apple decided to no longer support iWeb (with which this site was built). Combined with COVID, this has meant that these pages have been static for a while. I now have a legacy version of iWeb working on a legacy Mac, so they are being updated again. At least until I get a more modern web system going.
   

6. 12 Feb 2023 - Veloce Verde+Azzurro Cameras go into final assembly and integration. The image below shows the Azzurro camera in assembly at the AITC.
   

   

   
   

7. 15 Dec 2022 - Veloce Verde+Azzurro begins final assembly at the Astronomy Instrumentation Technology Centre at ANU, with shipping and integration at the telescope planned for April 2023.
   

8. 1 Dec 2022 - Successful LIEF grant in the LE23 round will fund the extra $300k required to implement a pseudo-slit viewing exposure meter - this fourth LIEF grant will deliver us the final component of the completed Veloce system.
   

9. 1 August 2022 - Verde, Azzurro and new Rosso cryostats complete. And testing of the new cryostat shows them to hold vacuum stably for months at a time.
   

   

   
   

10. 28 Nov 2018 - Veloce gets another ARC Discovery grant to hire a post-doc to work on Veloce science.
    

11. 17 Sep 2018 - Veloce First Light, First Science
    
    

    

    
    
    On the night of 17 Sep 2018, the Veloce project took a huge step forward, acquiring "first light" on tau Ceti - the traditional "first light" target for planetary programs. The image above shows the data obtained on the star, with the small dots next to every echelle order showing the simultaneous ThXe calibration lines.
    
    Our second target that night was the mid-M-dwarf planet host LHS3844, alerted by NASA's TESS just 12 days before to host a planet in a 0.46d orbit. We went on to observe it almost twice a night for every one of the 10 nights that followed.
    

12. 27 March 2018 - "New Y and T dwarfs from WISE identified by Methane Imaging" by Tinney, Kirkpatrick, Faherty, Mace, Cushing, Gelino, Burgasser, Sheppard & Wright is accepted to appear in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement. It can be found at astro-ph/1804.00362, or you can download a big version (33Mb) here, or a small version (7Mb) here.
    

13. 26 March 2018 - Veloce makes its first appearance at the AAT.
    Within the last week, the non-optical components of Veloce (i.e. both the inner and outer enclosures, climate control, computers, cables, hoses, etc.) were installed. The system is now being monitored remotely from RSAA to confirm required temperature and pressure stability.
    
    

    

    
    The spectrograph optics have been assembled at RSAA, and have been confirmed to deliver image quality that meets specifications, as well as throughput peaking at over 40%. And E2V have delivered a science grade CCD with QE of >97% from 400 to 600nm, dropping to 61% at 900nm.
    
    
14. 10 Nov 2017 - The Full Veloce is coming!
    

    

    
    The Veloce team has been successful in winning a third large LIEF grant to build and install the Verde and Azzurro cameras (i.e. the blue and green cameras) into Veloce. The result will be a stabilised, fixed-format facility delivering one-shot wavelength coverage from 390-950nm.
    

1. 1 Nov 2016 - Veloce gets an ARC Discovery Project grant to hire a post-doc to develop our data processing pipeline and do first science!
   

2. 16 Dec 2015 - The Exoplanetary Science at UNSW team has made their most exciting discovery yet - the closest potentially habitable planet found outside our solar system so far, orbiting a star just 14 light years away.
   
   

   

   
   
   The habitable-zone planet, more than four times the mass of the Earth, is one of three that the team detected around the red dwarf Wolf 1061. The larger outer planet falls just outside the outer boundary of the habitable zone and is also likely to be rocky, while the smaller inner planet is too close to the star to be habitable.
   
   More information and graphical material can be found at the UNSW Science Newsroom. A preprint of the accepted paper is arxiv, and here. Coverage included: SMH, ABC Online, CNN.com, Telegraph, and many other outlets.
   
   Update - Feb 2016 - THREE PLANETS ORBITING WOLF 1061 is now published.
   

3. See the News page for more details and an archive of older items.
   

This page last updated 3 August 2023