Instrument

A recurring problem with the ethernet connection to the FIES calibration unit control box located at the telescope when switching on one of the calibration lamps is thought to be caused by the power supply serving both the control box and the lamps. When a lamp is switched-on, the voltage of the power supply is reduce causing the MOXA box of the controller to reboot. An additional power supply has been installed to provide power for the two MOXA boxes separately.

As part of providing a full set of spares, the content of the two FIES Top Unit motor controllers (for the mask and arm movement) have been read so new ones can be programmed if needed.

Due to EU regulation regarding radio-active materials (Thorium), the standard ThAr lamps are no longer produced in the EU and hard to find. There is a company still producing ThAr lamps, but it is said that these are based on Thorium Oxide rather than metallic Thorium. We have borrowed such a lamp from the Mercator telescope for testing. In the mean time, to spare lamps, we no longer include the ThAr in the instrument (which is only infrequently used for the simultaneous ThAr mode), when taking our standard set of calibration exposures normally executed before the start of each observing night. We are considering to actually no longer offer the simultaneous ThAr mode as there are no specific advantages compared to taking ThAr exposures before and after a science exposure, except the time it takes to read out the detector. Especially if we receive the new detector controller for FIES (see above), the latter should not be any issue.

A paper with the title ``FIES: The high-resolution Fiber-fed Echelle Spectrograph at the Nordic Optical Telescope'' describing the FIES instrument has now been published. The official reference is ``Telting et al., 2014, Astronomische Nachrichten, Vol.335, Issue 1, p.41''; see:

http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/abs/2014AN....335...41T