NAS Fitcheck Day 11: Back To The Aux

A light day today, if you use the usual MagAO tempo as your standard. Alan and Tyson did a little work on the guider this morning.

Tyson at work on the guider with the NAS still mounted.
Here's the new and improved x travel limit of the guider probe.

We had some excitement today. Power to the telescope was accidentally shut off, and there was a brief attempt to blame Jared. It wasn’t him (based on what I was doing at the time, it wasn’t a dumb idea). We learned that the rotator breaks release if this happens, so we will be extra careful to make sure the rotator is pinned when we are woking inside the NAS.

Once the power was back on we craned the NAS off the telescope, and lowered it back down to ground level.

The NAS weighs 1800 lbs now, after adding counter weights during the balancing procedure. We apply this much preload with the crane so we can take the bolts off without dropping the whole thing.
The NAS making the journey from the Clay to the Aux building.
Laird says goodbye to his baby.

There was also a long earthquake this afternoon. Anecdotes suggest you needed to be sitting down to feel it. It was a 3.9 according to Universidad de Chile Depto. de Geofisica

After lunch we cleaned up after ourselves, inventoried our gear, made a shopping list (we go through zip ties like nobody’s business), and generally took it easy. We did install our brand new ASM cover:

The new ASM cover, and Jason Lewis.

After that, there was some relaxation, a run down to the 100″ and back, and maybe some snoozing. Once you get kicked off the telescope that’s it.

Another solitary horse today.
The LCO sky put on one last show for us. This was late afternoon. (click)
Tyson grabbed a nice sunset picture at dinner. (click)

Days without a motherboard failure: 10