The Backbeat of the Universe

This past week, I’ve been helping to re-commission the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and commission the first components of the new DESI spectrograph that we’ve been installing. In nautical terms, you can think of this as being like a shakedown cruise. We’re making sure the telescope is primed for taking scientific data and we want to assure we’ve worked out all the kinks from the telescope sitting idle for a year while it was rebuilt. We’re also making sure the c...