FIRST’s photonic lantern has just successfully completed the commissioning phase.
2 février 2026Par Luc Heintze
The beginning of February 2026 is a significant date for the research conducted at LIRA, since the dawn of the 21st century. The FIRST-PL (PL for Photonic Lantern) instrument, installed on the Subaru telescope at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, has just successfully completed its commissioning phase. This means that it has now been validated by the Subaru telescope committee and is therefore available to researchers. As of 2 February 2026, researchers can submit observation programmes to use telescope time. This is the very first photonic lantern to be made available to astronomers. New prospects for high angular resolution observations are opening up in the visible wavelength range.
The culmination of an idea initially proposed by Guy Perrin, astronomer at LIRA and member of the French Academy of Sciences, the photonic lantern is the result of a quarter of a century of research and technical improvements involving researchers, post-docs and PhD students at the laboratory. Among them, without being exhaustive : Sylvestre Lacour (2007), Elsa Huby (2013), Kevin Barjot (2023), Manon Lallement (2024), Jehanne Sarrazin (thesis in progress) ... No doubt others will follow !
On 22 October 2025, a publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters highlighted this excellent research based on international collaborations. We invite you to step back in time and experience this exciting adventure by visiting the FIRST project page. From its first draft to the still unfathomable possibilities opened up by the photonic lantern, fibre optic imaging will hold no more secrets for you.
Image du banc optique, avec la lanterne schématisée reliée au spectrographe
Chemin de la lumière provenant du télescope Subaru, traversant la lanterne photonique pour arriver dans le spectrographe.
