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A crime has been committed – and another may be in progress as I type. But we’ll get to that.

Today was less exciting than yesterday, but progress was made. MIKE, the instrument occupying the port we want to bolt to, was removed first thing this morning. After it was gone, we started getting the platform ready for our monster. It’s pretty motivating to be working on the actual telescope at long last.

We also had a look at how our cable will work. It has to drape off the platform gracefully, and not snag as the telescope moves.

Jason was leading the charge to get the ASM cooling system filled with Glycol.

Though it doesn’t make for good action shots, Glenn and Jared had a very successful round of software testing this afternoon. We’re ready to try our kung-fu out on the actual telescope. Keep your fingers crossed.

Now, we have some intrigue on this sleepy little mountain top. Tyson was the first person up to the ASB this morning, and much to his surprise the bananas in the kitchen were scattered about. He investigated, and found some damning evidence.

If you don’t know the most likely culprit for this heinous crime, you haven’t been reading this blog. Tyson even caught a glimpse of the little guy trying to repeat his daring exploit tonight. My hypothesis is that our buddy watched us move out yesterday and decided nobody was coming back.

Here’s a shot of the Magellan telescopes from the lodge deck.

Days without a motherboard failure: 7

I couldn’t stay awake long enough last night for all of our videos to upload to youtube. Unless your name is Posterity you may not want to watch every second of these, but there are some interesting things happening.

Here is the NAS rolling out of the cleanroom. Scroll to 0:56 for Jared’s most important contribution to the project to date:

And here it goes from the lift to the truck:

Here we are placing it on blocks to stabilize it. Also, Jason comes up with the official MagAO logo:

See last night’s post (Day 7) for the drive up the mountain.

Here the team is using a come-along to get it back off the truck:

Here is the end of unloading and the placement of the NAS in the Aux building. It passes several Magellan instruments on the way in: The Planet Finding Spectrograph (PFS), Megacam, MMIRS, and Phase-Cam.

In this short clip the electronics racks are rolled into their new home. They fit.

A big day for Magellan AO today. As planned, we packed up our computers and the NAS and moved them to the summit.

This video shows the truck leaving the cleanroom. This was the practice run for the much more delicate NAS.

After lunch, we moved on to the NAS itself. We homed our stages, put on our dust covers, installed the electronics box lids, and threw it on a truck.

This video shows most of the loading process and the drive up the hill.

This video shows the NAS making the last turn at the top.

The other big news from today was the run’s first Guanaco sighting. Laird caught some movement on the side of the hill on our way to lunch, and Jason and I got as close as we could to investigate.

Days without a motherboard failure: 6

We start our move up to the Clay tomorrow, so today was mainly spent getting ready. We disconnected and drained the supply lines for the NAS cooling system.

That hose, along with a bunch of power and data cables, was made into a cable and we started wrapping it around the NAS. The NAS will move up to the Aux building between the telescopes tomorrow.

Another detail to worry about is balancing the NAS so we don’t overload the rotator motors. The crew finished a counter-weight today, and Alan and Tyson installed it.

Meanwhile, we also tested the main chiller which keeps the ASM itself cool.

Emilio wrote some software to monitor and control the system. See below for a video of it in action during the above test.

While everybody else has been getting their hands dirty, I’ve been putting our VisAO camera through some tests (mainly focusing). As I complain about regularly, we never get very much time to see what it can do. Here are some reduced images with our coronagraphic occulting spot.

Tonight’s quote: “Hey Laird, how long do you plan to use this instrument? I mean it’s not just for Jared’s PhD right?” (Jason Lewis)

Tyson and Jason finished designing our new cable wrap system. Here are some views of the plan (note: if you are an important person at Magellan, check your email for more):

Luckily Juan found a piece of 4″ PVC pipe to use for the “stove pipe”. I don’t want to know where it was used before.

This morning we declared our CCD cooling system air-tight and started running water through it. Here are some videos of the filling, pressurizing, and starting of the pump for the first time.

All this plumbing appears to have paid off. Our CCD39 read noise is down to 4.1 electrons, and we can read our CCD47 (the VisAO science camera) full-frame with 4.5 electrons – and maybe lower depending on ambient temperature. The cooling system helps us achieve these numbers because it keeps dark current low. The CCD 39 having low RON helps us work on faint guide stars, especially important for Clio2 (in case you missed it, Katie posted an update on Clio2’s progress towards shipping here).

It wasn’t all work today.

Today’s quote: “I can imagine the feeling.” (Alan Uomoto)

And speaking of Alan, I know at least two things about him. He reads this blog, and he cares. So much so that he went out of his way to make sure that Marcia Males has a poop-free picture of her son.

And on my way down for supper, I had a close encounter with the VisAO mascot. He’s getting to know me I think.

Days without a motherboard failure: 4