Today, a team of astronomers from Europe led by group of the Observatoire de Geneve announced the discovery of SEVEN exoplanets around a southern hemisphere star called HD 10180.  Even if the name of the star is far from being memorable, our community will remember this major leap in the quest of exoplanets.

Masayuki Tachikawa, amateur astronomer from Kumamoto city, Japan, reported the detection of an optical flash on Jupiter atmosphere recorded on August 20 2010 at 18:22:12 UT.

Just a short post today. I am still recovering from the SETIcon. I will tell you more about it soon. An image is worth a thousand words so just look at this picture taken by Messenger Spacecraft.

The binary system Earth-Moon seen from the Messenger Spacecraft with its Wide Angle Camera (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)

Already three nights on the telescope and we still have no fringes… It looks worrisome but in fact we anticipated difficulties in installing FIRST prototype which is essentially a lab testbench on the Shane telescope. The good news is that every night we have made significant progresses and we identified several sources of problems. So we remained positive and continued  improving the instrument and understanding how to use it on sky.

As I mentioned before, the Grail of our experiment called FIRST, is to record patterns of interference fringes. Using these “images” we should be able to reconstruct an image with a high dynamic at proximity of the star, allowing us to explore the close vicinity of a nearby star. This is an interesting area, unknown to astronomers and where exoplanets form. To validate this technique we mounted FIRST on the Shane-3m telescope. As predicted this hunt for fringes was a long and tedious task.

A mysterious hand tightening up an optics is seen through the periscope mirror recently installed on the Shane adaptive optics system.

After two long days of work we decided to point the telescope on the bright star called Eta Pegasi (Matar). I remind you that it was already 4am PDT so we were all quite exhausted and we had only a short amount of time before the sunrise.

After a complicated mounting of the instrument on the telescope, we spent the entire first 2 days and a large part of the beginning of the night, reinstalling and realigning the FIRST instrument. JUly 23 and July 24 were  busy days with zillion of problems to solve. I am going to share you the “joy” of instrumentation in this post.

As I mentioned previously,  the FIRST fibered-imager prototype was rebuilt and tested successfully in the lab at Lick Observatory. On July 22, we were therefore ready to mount it on the top of the adaptive optics of the Shane-3m telescope.

I mentioned in this blog that the FIRST instrument is the result of collaborations between several engineers & astronomers from everywhere in the world. On July 20, I went to the San Jose Airport near SETI Institute to meet in person for the first time in person Takayuki Kotani to give him a ride to the Lick Observatory.

Takayuki Kotani and his Karaoke addiction. :-)

On July 14 (Bastille day), shortly after we received the crates, Guy Perrin, astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris and Elsa Huby, a graduate student at the observatoire de Paris, arrived  the first time at the Lick Observatory. The picture below was taking as they were climbing the stairs of the Shane telescope building at their arrival during the sunset. An important event not as “glamorous”  than the climbing of the stairs of the famous Cannes festival but definitely more important for a lot of us…

Guy Perrin and Elsa Huby as they arrived at Lick Observatory on July 14 2010