Another eventful day for MagAO. The big news is that we unpacked and inspected the shell, and it is in one piece. The delicate unpacking procedure took most of the day.
The moment of truth:
Here’s a longer version of the last few minutes of unpacking, featuring the smooth stylings of Armando Riccardi and the mirror handling team:
Meanwhile, a whole bunch of other stuff was happening. In addition to completing the guider work we also setup the ASM cooling circuit.
Alan and Tyson finished testing our newly installed guider this morning. Here’s a quick demo of the probe moving out of the way, as it would after collimating the telescope.
More progress at LCO today. The ASM unit was unpacked and moved into the cleanroom, the mount ring was attached to the ASM handling cart, the finishing touches were placed on our guider, assorted other odds and ends got checked off, and the Arcetri component of our team arrived. Now on with the show:
This video shows the ASM being moved into the clean room.
We hit another snag today. Our “wedge plate”, which is part of the mounting system which holds the ASM on the telescope, was found to have been made with a set of holes clocked by about 60 degrees. This is an easy thing to fix – we’ll drill new holes tomorrow.
Another eventful day here at Las Campanas. Some more of the team arrived: Richard Sosa from Steward, Tyson Hare from Carnegie (Pasadena) and Mario Andrighettoni and Frederico Piccin from Microgate (Bolzano Italy). We unpacked the flipping bench, and even more exciting was the first mounting of our 4 electronics boxes on the NAS ring. This also led to our first glitch. After dinner we started unpacking the ASM unit itself. As usual, here are some pictures of all the fun:
So we had our first glitch today. After mounting the VisAO box on the NAS, we noticed that a box bolted to the side (part of its liquid cooling system) would prevent the NAS from rotating to the vertical while on the transport cart. Even though this is only a problem when the system is off the telescope, we still need to fix it. The fix sounds simple: get a smaller box. As usual, it ain’t that easy. Removing the box meant almost completely gutting the VisAO electronics box. Fun.
At the end of the day, VisAO is all back together and working. We’ll mount it on the NAS tomorrow as soon as we get a chance. We also powered up the “Little Joe” CCD controllers today, and verified that they survived the trip. Things continue to go well.
We kept at it on our 2nd day (our 1st full day). Today we unpacked the NAS, installed the guider in the NAS (for the first time), unpacked and tested our computers, and after dinner we unpacked and inspected the WFS. Some pix: