First light on sky
First light on sky was obtained by HARPS-N
First light raw frame of a stellar spectrum on the detector system screen. A cut along the spectrum shows the absorption lines of atmospheric oxygen. This event had to be celebrated with a glass of Champagne.
On March 27th, three days before the official date, first 'stellar' light was acquired by the HARPS-N spectrograph. This 'technical' light was obtained with the spectrograph not yet operated in nominal terms, by pointing and centering the telescope 'manually' and without the data-reduction pipeline installed.
There is still quite some work to do in order to prepare the instrument for standard operations, but the first spectra look already fantastic.
