DDOTI Presented at “Deciphering the Violent Universe”

14 December 2017

Rosa Becerra-Godínez gave an oral presentation on DDOTI (and COATLI) at the “Deciphering the Violent Universe” conference.

DDOTI Closed for the Winter Break

14 December 2017

The OAN ceases operations for three weeks over Christmas and New Year. DDOTI closed today and will reopen in the week of 8 January 2018.

DDOTI Can Now Close in the Cold

7 December 2017

We believe we have finally fixed a problem that caused the DDOTI enclosure to fail to close at low temperatures.

The DDOTI enclosure was mistakenly shipped with standard oil in the gearboxes and small capacitors on the motors. This caused it to fail to close below +10 C. We replaced the oil with a local low-temperature oil and larger capacitors, but the enclosure would still fail to close below +5 C. This obviously caused significant restrictions on robotic operations and impeded commissioning.

Over the last few days, we installed special low-temperature oil and special larger capacitors sent by the manufacturer, and tonight were able to successfully close at −6 C! We hope the problem is now solved.

DDOTI Optical Alignment

26 October 2017

We have aligned one of the tubes of DDOTI using a prototype tip-tilt adapter designed by Alex Farah. This is necessary because the telescope beam is fast (f/2.2) and the detector is large (37 mm square). The tube now gives uniform images with 2 pixel FWHM (4 arcsec) over the whole field of view. To demonstrate this, we show below a 60 second image of the Andromeda Galaxy M31 and its satellite galaxies M32 and M110.

Image of M31, M32, and M110.

M31 and its satellites M32 and M110 imaged by DDOTI after optical alignment.

DDOTI in Nature News

13 October 2017

Davide Castelvecchi has written a Nature News article on DDOTI and other telescopes dedicated to the search for the optical counterparts of gravitational wave events.

DDOTI First-Light

30 June 2017

We gave a press conference to announce first-light with DDOTI! DDOTI was operating with only two tubes, but even so the combined field was about 23 square degrees.

DDOTI image of the Virgo Cluster

The first-light image with DDOTI showing M87 and other galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. This image was taken with two tubes, each with a field of 3.4 degrees to a side. The final imager will have a field that is three times larger. The moon is shown to give an idea of the scale.

Image of the DDOTI tubes

The two DDOTI tubes at about the time of first light.

Image of the DDOTI tower

The DDOTI tower at about the time of first light.

First-light was the result of the work of many people, including: Fernando Ángeles, Rosa Becerra, Tülin Bedel, Nathaniel Butler, Alejandro Farah, Manuel González, Josef Huber, William Lee, Liliana Figueroa, Fernando Quirós, Carlos Román-Zúñiga, Carlos Tejada, and Alan Watson.

For more details (in Spanish), see:

First-light was reported by the Mexican press, including:

DDOTI Installation

6 June 2017

Members of the DDOTI team, along with Josef Huber and Tülin Bedel of ASTELCO Systems GmbH, have begun the installation of the DDOTI tower, enclosure, mount, and first two tubes.