  The High Efficiency and Resolution Multi Element Spectrograph, HERMES, is a
facility-class optical spectrograph for the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT).
It is designed primarily for Galactic Archaeology, the first major attempt to
create a detailed understanding of galaxy formation and evolution by studying
the history of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The goal of the GALAH survey is
to reconstruct the mass assembly history of the Milky Way through a detailed
chemical abundance study of one million stars. The spectrograph is based at the
AAT and is fed by the existing 2dF robotic fiber positioning system. The
spectrograph uses volume phase holographic gratings to achieve a spectral
resolving power of 28,000 in standard mode and also provides a high-resolution
mode ranging between 40,000 and 50,000 using a slit mask. The GALAH survey
requires an SNR greater than 100 for a star brightness of V ?= 14 in an
exposure time of one hour. The total spectral coverage of the four channels is
about 100 nm between 370 and 1000 nm for up to 392 simultaneous targets within
the 2-degree field of view. HERMES has been commissioned over three runs,
during bright time in October, November, and December 2013, in parallel with
the beginning of the GALAH pilot survey, which started in November 2013. We
present the first-light results from the commissioning run and the beginning of
the GALAH survey, including performance results such as throughput and
resolution, as well as instrument reliability.
