AAO Newsletter July 1996 - Page 5

is 31° 16.4'S 149° 04.2'E) and comes with the yearly time correction so that I can calculate AEST to the nearest minute from solar time.

The sundial itself has eight sides and measures 13" from point to point. It arrived at site about 6 weeks ago and I opted for a presentation at the Siding Spring Christmas party.

My health is slowly improving and retirement was the correct decision. It lifted the worry and uncertainty of when I would again be fit for work which now is irrelevant.

Again, thank you all very much and we will all here at Holly Farm treasure my traditional gift of a retirement watch for very many billions of years until its power source finally dies.

Thank you - Ann

First Science Data from 2dF

As reported elsewhere in this newsletter, the past two months have seen an accelerating phase of 2dF commissioning with numerous milestones now being achieved. One of the most significant of these, not least because of the boost which it gave to the moral of the commissioning team, was the configuration of the first 2dF 'science' field and the collection of the first astrophysically useful spectra.

Figure 1: Field configuration generated from the SuperCOSMOS position data using the offline CONFIGURE programme. The small circles represent galaxy positions whilst the larger circles are guide stars. For this first demonstration run the maximum non-radial angle for the object fibres was kept deliberately small to reduce the number of fibre crossovers. A number of parked fibres were disabled for technical reasons.

Whilst 2dF has been successfully positioning its magnetic fibre buttons for some months now, until the June run these configurations have typically involved only 30-40 fibres on bright PPM stars for the purposes of astrometric tests. The science field shown in Fig. 1 represented the first large-scale deployment of the magnetic buttons and retractors, including both crossovers and reasonably