MEGARA Project

One of our INAOE colleagues wearing a cool MEGARA lab coat.

More MEGARA Folded-Cassegrain hardware getting manufactured and mounted at AVS: rotator adapter, focal plane cover, fiber & power supply routing structure ... awesome work. It seems that both Santa and the Three Wise Men have been very generous with the MEGARA team these Christmas.

Folded-Cassegrain electronics of both the robotic positioners and the focal-plane being assembled at AVS. Good work!

Rotator setup in charge of holding the entire MEGARA Folded-Cassegrain adapter and sub-system as it is being mounted . Isn't it beautiful? Paraphrasing the Sultan in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" ... And I even like the color!

MEGARA barrels: Collimator barrel at left and Camera barrel at right. Well done, INAOE and CIDESI-CONACYT!

Back-side view of the MEGARA single aspheric lens - COLL-S1

Pre-assembly of the first series of MEGARA Fiber MOS robotic positioners. Rotation 1 is already pre-assembled for this series. Well done AVS!

MEGARA LCB (623-fiber IFU & sky bundles) has been glued to the corresponding microlens arrays. Congratulations to the MEGARA-Fractal gluing team: Ernesto, Ana & Ismael. Good and precise job! Seeing all those 623 fibers (arranged in 7-fiber minitubes) out of their frame placed on the newly refurbished MEGARA gluing station is scary.

But the technical works INAOE is advancing in parallel. Nice pictures of the (R~20000) HR-I VPH prism (1.5 fringes!!!) and of the impressive collimator barrel as it just arrived from CIDESI-CONACYT.

... and during the symposium dinner (the red eyes are because of the camera flash, I promise)

But we also had time to spend some time with the MEGARA family at large during the meeting ...