I’ve teamed up with John Johnson and Nate McCrady to build an array of small (0.7 m) telescopes to find rocky planets orbiting the brightest, nearest, Sun-like stars.  We call it Project Minerva (originally this was a sort of portmanteau/initialism of “miniature” and “RV array” and other various ideas from an earlier version of the project; now it’s just a distinctive name). 

Penn State is providing the first of the telescopes, a PlaneWave CDK-700.  I had originally envisioned that Minerva would join Swift, the Hobby-Eberly telescope, and even the rooftop and new arboretum telescopes on campus as part of “Nittary Observatory” (one observatory, geographically distributed echoing our (now-indicted) former president’s description of Penn State). 

Anyway, this first telescope was to be called the PSU Automated Telescope for Exoplanet Reconnaissance at Nittany Observatory (PATERNO).

Yeah, I know.  Things change.

So for now we call the telescope “T1”.

Anyway, I’ll do a blog post on the rationale and methodology later, but for now I’m thrilled to report that T1 is really finally actually ours! 

The delivery date to our Pasadena testbed was supposed to be April 1, which excited me because I just happened to be giving a talk at Caltech that day (why we bought that delivery date I’ll never know:).  It was pushed back because of a faulty lens, so I missed delivery, but now everything is ship-shape and ready for use.

The Apogee camera doesn’t have any filter wheels yet, but we can still take white-light images.  Here is the first, of M51:
  The Caltech team apparently used tricks from near-infrared astronomers to subtract the bright sky background (nodding and subtracting) to produce this “first-light” image.  Exposure time is 60s and no flat fielding was performed.  Not bad for 2″.7 seeing from the middle of Pasadena!  Here are our first-night observers in the “aqawan” enclosure on E. California Boulevard across from Cahill:

Actually, I’m told first light was really the crescent moon (I guess they couldn’t wait to get on sky)!