Preparing first light of LAMOST

Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) is an innovative telescope project with both large aperture (effective in 4 meters) and wide field of view (5 degrees) to achieve the large scale spectroscopic survey observation. It is a horizontal meridian reflecting Schmidt configuration realized by an active deformable Schmidt plate. For achieving such an ambitious project with limited budget, both its primary mirror (6.67m × 6.05m) and Schmidt plate (5.74m × 4.4m) are segmented. LAMOST project is expected to be completed before the end of 2008. The assembly and test of whole telescope and 16 spectrographs with 4000 optical fibers in its focal plane is going to be finished in August of 2008. With just its partial aperture, more than 200 optical fibers and one spectrograph, the scientific commissioning has been done and some preliminary results have been obtained. This paper introduces the progress of LAMOST project during 2007 and 2008, and presents the achievement in its technology which is also useful for the future extremely large telescopes.