From our CTIO Director: Chris Smith

As the CTIO Director, I am not always available to be at ground zero, observing at the Blanco 4m on Cerro Tololo.  This weekend, however, is different.  I packed my bags and headed up to the telescope to help with the DECam commissioning.  It is not only exciting  to learn to drive this impressive optical imager (I'll be joining the instrument support team as we move into operations), it is also exciting for me to see the progress made since we had first light 1.5 weeks ago.  The first light images were surprisingly good, but since then we've achieved sub-arcsecond images quite often and we are testing many of systems that will be part of the nightly operations, such as calibration sequences, focus scans, the guider system, astrometric information, "donut" analysis for focus, and others.  The commissioning team (a combination of CTIO, Fermilab, and other DES colleagues) is working well together here in Chile with support from sites in US, Spain, England, Germany, and Switzerland (hopefully I didn't forget anyone!) to tune the many supporting sub-systems into a smoothly running instrument+telescope system.  We've still got quite a bit of work in front of us, but the progress is excellent.