Author: Jared Males

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.

So you may have heard that we have had lots of things to fix on this run. From the very beginning there was an issue with one of the motor shafts in Clio: you might remember that Clio wasn’t ready on our first night. Everybody but Jordan Stone would have been fine without that motor shaft being connected.

Then there was the motor electronics failure — turns out it was the same wheel in Clio. We could have done 99% of the science on this run without it.

Next it was the X stage. You’ll of course remember that we replaced a motor at the beginning of the run. That was specifically because of Jordan Stone’s science. Lately, we’d been having trouble with that same motor. I stayed up late to replace the controller, which didn’t fix it. Eventually, with help from Emilio, we traced it to a loose wire on a connector (we think, verdict isn’t final). Again — everybody else would have been happy with the old X motor, and everybody else could have just worked with the faulty wire.

You would think that after all of this bad news, all of the ways in which the system keeps almost breaking in a way that affects only Jordan, that he would just give up. But he came anyway, and with the exception of some clouds it looks like he’s getting lucky with MagAO.

Laird wandered into the control room today. I guess that means we get to go home soon.

Edit by the Blog Administrators to comply with The 2015A Blog Rules:

“Maria makes the mountains sound like folks were up there dyin'”

We’ve already used up some of the best wind songs, and we’re just getting started. I saw at least one gust of 64 mph on our wind gage up here at Clay. The LCO weather page doesn’t go that high:

Down at the 100″ DuPont telescope, they were getting hammered by high 60s (mph) for hours. We still haven’t reached the MagAO record. Maybe tomorrow.

I made this recording in the dome tonight while winds were over 50 (it’s not your computer, the lights were off).

It was clear tonight, which was nice after last night. But seeing was pretty bad (for LCO), and the winds kicked up again. We’ve had a few days respite from these winter gusts coming from the NE, but now we are again huddling with our back to them, pointing to the SW.

This seems appropriate.

The wind was blowing and the stars were twinkling hard tonight. We still got some science done, but it was less fun than we’re used to. Also, we only planned some troubleshooting — we didn’t actually do any tonight.

Here’s an action shot of the instrument scientist aligning Clio at sunset. This is temporarily a very manual process due to our dead motor controller. We’re happy to say that the replacement is on its way, so Katie only has to do this a few more times.

Since Vizzy and Alberto posted some Mariah the other day, here’s my response. Maria is making sure we remember her name on this run — take it from us, she really does blow the stars around.

Just in case you aren’t in the know, Mariah Carey was named after this song.