Progress continued during the second week of on-sky commissioning with ComCam. Per plan, the main emphasis in this period is on Active Optics System (AOS) commissioning. Early in the week, the end-to-end system was successfully run in a closed loop configuration (triplets of intra-focal, extra-focal, and in-focus images; wavefront analysis; apply recommended updates to telescope parameters; iterate) for rigid body as well as a subset of mirror figure bending mode degrees of freedom. This marks an important achievement by the team. Significant time was also spent verifying the wavefront response to applying various optical degrees of freedom. Over time, the delivered image quality continued to improve, demonstrating the capability to deliver sub-arcsecond PSF FWHM, even with many of the optical adjustments and environmental controls not yet fully in place.
As the delivered image quality becomes more stable, the team is beginning to take sets of repeated visits of a given field with focal-plane-scale dithers around a pointing center for science pipelines commissioning. The data management system has begun testing the internal astrometric solution and image coaddition with the on-sky ComCam data.
Most of the earlier data taking was in r-band, and now other bands (g and i) are also in the rotation.
In the coming weeks, the emphasis will continue to be on AOS commissioning and making the whole system run more efficiently. The current plan is to continue on-sky ComCam data taking through mid-December.