Murison was one of the observers for the dFTS project on its recent outing to the Steward Observatory 90-inch on Kitt Peak. Murison was responsible for the care and feeding of the adaptive optics guider, both hardware and software, and hence spent the first data-taking nights guiding at (actually, directly underneath) the telescope. Despite some serious difficulties — such as discovering that the AO mirror zero position is substantially skewed and that the fiber optic vendor shipped a 50-micron fiber instead of the 100-micron one that was ordered — the observing run has been a great success. Long-time observer Robert McMillan (collaborator at Steward Obs.) commented several times that he's never seen an inaugural observing run with a new instrument go so well.
Murison is nearly finished with a technical memorandum documenting the dFTS adaptive optics guider hardware, optics, and software. A draft of this document fortuitously contributed to the success of the recent observing run. The wrong fiber already mentioned necessitated optical redesign at both ends of the fiber (i.e., inside the dFTS and inside the guider box). The equations Murison developed were crucial to determining the guider box optics changes. Luckily, the redesign in the instrument freed up a lens that just happened to be of a useable focal length for the guider box modifications, converting the F/9 beam from the telescope to the very fast F/3 needed both by the alterations at the dFTS end and in order to put all of the star image down the (too-small) fiber.
