#Moog #Mavis internals, before assembly. #PhotoMonday #Photography https://flic.kr/p/2q1Bi4b
The MAVIS project gets some air time in Macquarie University's latest round of promotional videos. Here's Richard McDermid talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1aoz7K6CE8
Some spare parts from the Malya satellite thermal imaging payload that was built at the AAO put in a cameo appearance too.
Because I work on it I feel obliged to note that the MAVIS instrument being built for the VLT telescope (https://mavis-ao.org/) will be really, really, really good at the crucial Cepheid/RGB Tip/JAGB part of the Cosmic Distance Ladder, thanks to its unparalleled combination of spatial resolution and sensitivity, and both imaging and integral field spectroscopic capabilities.
This does get called out in the MAVIS Science Case paper, section 3.4: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09242
I've been getting myself excited about getting the MAVIS instrument (https://mavis-ao.org/) on the telescope, even though that's still ~3 years off.
I was looking at this gorgeous image of Jupiter taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (https://esahubble.org/images/heic2017a/) and realising that MAVIS could do this with significantly higher resolution. Thanks to being on an 8 metre rather than 2.4 metre telescope MAVIS will have 3.3x the resolving power of HST, and the pixel sampling will be 5.4x finer (7.36 mas vs 40 mas).
I'm just looking at this 400% zoom crop and imagining a MAVIS image that's pin-sharp at the same magnification.
