HARPing on about the JCMT
As will probably be obvious in the final program that we’re filming out here, I have a very strong affection for the JCMT as it’s the telescope that I’ve used for my own observations. It was wonderful to be sitting in the control room yesterday as the scientists from Cambridge worked on commissioning the new receiver HARP-B which is going to producing amazing results in the next few years or so. Esentially, it’s a spectrograph sensitive to a whole range of molecular transitions but it has one feature which makes it a huge improvement on previous instrumentation - it produces an image and then takes many thousands of spectra, one for each pixel in the image. There’s a lot of work still to be done but the first results - on a bright line in Orion - look promising and I can’t wait to attempt to get my hands on it.
Spectra and spectrographs get buried under the avalanche of wonderful images, but are often responsible for much of the exciting science. Expect to hear much more about HARP results on the Sky at Night before too long!
