ESPRESSO - a new revolutionary spectrograph

On april 11th, I had the great opportunity to visit the Observatory of Geneva and the assembling/testing site for the new very high Radial Velocity accuracy spectrograph: ESPRESSO. Organised by Alexandre Santerne (we just learned he succeeded the exam to be an astronomer at the LAM astronomycal lab in Marseille, France), the visit was led by Francesco Pepe who worked on HAPRS and now his successor - ESPRESSO.

The new facility is impressive and we learned a lot on how professional astronomers and engineers are designing the spectrograph that will search for exo-Earth exoplanets. The spectrograph will be used by one or the four VLT telescopes. More on ESPRESSO can be found there:
https://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/develop/instruments/espresso.html

OK.. let's go for a selfie there... :-)

Francesco presenting the overall ESPRESO goals & design

View from above

The old Geneva observatory dome in a field near-by...

it may become a famous bar place in the future! :-)

Special clothing to get into the clean ESPRESSO integration room

A second selfie for me... :-)

Francesco Pepe and Thierry Lemoult during the tour

The structure inside

Waiting the the camera?

Some first parts in place

Continuous lamp (plasma excited by laser)

Wavelength calibration

Alexandre Santerne & the director of the Geneva Observatory

Pisa

With my wife Rachel, I had a great opportunity to travel to Pisa (Italy) and visit Steve Shore, profesor at the Univeristy of Pisa, and some of his students in Astrophysics. We went through the concept of Astronomical Spectroscopy, spectrograph design & finetuning. We were able to observe one night with the observatory & spectrograph at the top of the roof of the university. The following day, we could talk about data reduction algorithms.

Pisa is also a beautiful city with some very nice place to eat and lot of History. But most importantly, people are so nice!!! :-)

 in Steve Shore's office...

Observing at night

Rachel & I at Donati's square