Well the system is back in storage, and we’re good and ready to get out of here.
We couldn’t go even one last day without troubleshooting something. We did a bunch of testing on our recalcitrant “X stage” motor, including spending some time on the phone with an engineer at Copley Controls. It looks like we made some progress, but unfortunately we won’t know until November. One important detail is that it almost certainly isn’t my fault.
We also attacked our atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC), which has been suffering from some mechanical interference (that means parts rub against each other and so it stops spinning). We figured out how to shim one of the motors, which made a big improvment. Fingers crossed for next time.
It felt really good to be awake with the Sun up. We got to see parts of LCO we had mostly forgotten about.