What's New - June 2000 What's New - June 2000 
The 2000 PLANET observing season is almost here and activities in the group are primarily to do with getting ready for the gruelling observing schedule this will entail. Reports are that this year we will have plenty of help from OSU and IAP observers which will make things a lot easier (mostly on John).
On the equipment side Keith is about to complete wiring up of the new microwave ethernet link which will give us a permanent connection as well as vastly better performance. Two new (to us) Sparc-stations and Cicada and Midas software upgrades will make life much less frustrating for observers and data processors. John has just returned from MSO where he installed a new 512x512 backlit thinned SITE science-grade chip to replace the existing E-grade chip used last year. We now also have a 1024x1024 array which we hope to use for optical identification of gamma-ray burst and transient X-ray sources. Tony unveiled the actuator frame for the new tip-tilt system for the tertiary mirror last week, and with luck that too will be in place in time to start observing. Initially the tip-tilt will be used only for autoguiding using a Pixcell 255 in place of the old ST-4 camera. Later we hope to install a fast new camera to permit full tip-tilt correction. Dennis is working on improvements to the CCD camera secondary cooler and on a dome flat-field system. In all there are some really significant improvements to the telescope this year which should see a real improvement in both ease of use and quality of output. We'll need a major update of the observers notes to cope with the changes.
Finally on the thesis front, both Steve and I are madly writing up at present. As a result this will probably be my last task for the optical astronomy web pages, I'm handing things over to John. So the next update will have to wait until he finds any time to work on it!