First light for new spectrograph
Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 11:32
in Astronomy & Space
The new observing instrument VIRUS-W, built by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the University Observatory Munich, saw "first light" on 10th November at the Harlan J. Smith Telescope of the McDonald observatory in Texas. Its first images of a spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away are an impressive confirmation of the capabilities of the instrument, which can determine the motion of stars in near-by galaxies to a precision of a few kilometers per second.