Comm2 Day 21: All packed up

Today Laird, Jared, and I packed everything up in preparation for departing… and possibly not coming back for almost a year.

Jared was in charge of backing up all of our computers and archiving the VisAO data. We have 5 computers on the mountain: The WFS supervisor, the ASM supervisor, the VisAO supervisor, the VisAO camera computer, and the Clio camera computer. It’s a good thing he knows what he’s doing.

Jared starts up a bunch of jobs to back-up the computers and archive the data. Nice hard hat.

Laird and I supervised the ASM’s journey from the top of the mountain to the clean room in the ASB. This always makes me a little nervous. We had to wait until the afternoon to do it, because in the morning there were winds up to 33 mph, a bit too windy for shipping around such delicate equipment. But it went very well and the ASM is now safely in the clean room.

We bring the ASM down from the telescopes to the Astronomer Support Building where the clean room is.
The ASM backing up to the ASB.
The P.I. supervises closely.

Laird and Dave attached the new dust covers to the NAS.

Jared and I did an inventory of our supplies so that we can remember what we need to re-stock next time.

I said goodbye to Vizzy.

When I was walking down from the mountain tonight after doing a last sweep, I walked in the dark, and my eyes got adapted so that I could see my shadow by the crescent moon, and more and more stars appeared. The Magellanic Clouds really pop down here too.

OK, this picture of Enrico and Alfio under the stars is by Enrico from
Nov. 25th Comm1, but I also didn’t have any good night-time pictures (with my cell phone).