It is the biggest and most precise spectrograph in the world, Marcy said. His sherpa guide was Vogt, his former teacher, spectral guru and the newest member of his team. Vogt directed the construction of the giant new spectrograph. And he and Vogt gently laid a piece of cardboard over one of the sacrosanct mirrors. This was, they explained, part of their continuing effort to tweak and improve the system's performance.
Most astronomers walk up to a telescope and use the existing equipment. . . .
It's insane. . . . The dome slid silently open to the darkening sky. And after that, the stars they saw were dots on a computer screen, the light translated into shifting squiggly lines. Marcy e-mailed a list of target stars to Keck control technician Wayne Wack, who sat at a bank of computer screens about 15 feet away. The target star appeared as a black dot on the lower right of one of Wack's screens.