Commissioning FEROS, the new high-resolution spectrograph at La Silla.

On November 30, 1998, the second commissioning phase of the new Fiberfed Extended Range Optical Spectrograph (FEROS) was completed at the ESO 1.52-m telescope at La Silla. The instrument had been installed by a small team from the Heidelberg, Copenhagen and La Silla observatories starting in mid-September - just two years after the contract signature between the FEROS consortium and ESO. FEROS saw its first stellar light at the end of the installation phase on October 6th. An overview of the design and of the expected capabilities of the FEROS instrument has been presented in a previous paper [Kaufer et al., 1997, The Messenger 89, 1]; a more detailed description of the opto-mechanical design is found in [Kaufer & Pasquini, 1998, Proc, SPIE Vol. 3355, p. 844]. In the present article, the major technical results from the two commissioning phases which followed the first light event are reported.