Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Well, it did a heck of a job of rutting up this steep down-hill sort road in front of our house, that's for sure! Fortunately the Village sent out a grader to smooth it out and repair a big pothole at the bottom corner.

Our fire danger, according to the sign at the bottom of the mountain, was Extreme, #5 on the scale, as of Wednesday when I headed home. Thursday afternoon, Russet forwarded me an email, from her boss, from the Nat'l Forest Service, that the forest was reopening! And when I went home yesterday evening, it was down to #2!

Major woots!

Today driving in to work, all of the barricades blocking forest access had been removed, I guess forest workers were busy yesterday afternoon, last night and this morning!

This is a major relief because we've had a lot of major fires here in New Mexico, I'm guessing the rains have helped a lot.

Now we just have to contend with getting the telescope's mirror re-aluminized. Kitt Peak in Tucson, Arizona just got singed: three buildings destroyed - a dormitory, cafeteria, and residence. Road damaged, power lines damaged. So they're going to be seriously degraded for a significant amount of time. They were the normal site to get Apache Point's 3.5 meter mirror re-aluminized, but they've been putting Apache Point off for some time, to the point that yet again the 3.5 is not going to get serviced this year! This will now be 3-4 years PAST the point that it should have been done! The mirror is now looking quite disgusting. I think the current coating will be 7-9 years old before it gets redone! The next closest mirror lab is FLAGSTAFF, Arizona, and there are some serious logistics to getting there. And you'll love this - the next closest lab may be HAWAII.

That's just unimaginable if they had to ship the mirror to Hawaii. That would be probably three months the telescope would be out of action! And then if something happened to the ship and it were lost at sea?! Catastrophe! The telescope would be out of action for a few YEARS! The entire crew would be lost to other opportunities! All that institutional knowledge lost! Total chaos, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... MASS HYSTERIA!

Never pass up the opportunity to use a good Ghostbusters line, even if it is nigh unto 40 years old. :-)


Oh, another amusing thing happened at the observatory this week. They received an instrument from [CENSORED]. It was mounted on the telescope, and the controller issued some unexpected low-level commands to the telescope controllers and they effing BROKE THE TELESCOPE! They caused mirror actuators on the secondary and tertiary mirrors to throw fits and seize up and they couldn't recover them, and one point they thought they might have to disassemble the tertiary mirror! Eventually they were able to get both mirrors to behave, but it was a close-run thing.

Fortunately the weather was so wretched that they haven't been able to open for over a week and [CENSORED] lost all their time on the sky! Serves the bat rastards right for screwing up the telescope!

OH! Another story about these yoinks! This one is great!

So the telescope enclosure is built on three levels. The ground story is sort of an equipment shop. Air compressors, electrical panels and conduits, network cabling (fiber optics) enter at this point. Stairs go up to the intermediate level. Concrete pylon rises through the middle which is the telescope's resting post.

Intermediate level is where the top level is suspended from. All sorts of electronics here for the telescope's instruments, cryogenic cooling systems, atomic clock, GPS systems, motor for moving the dome and the round railroad tie that the dome sits on, the telescope collar that it actually rotates on, etc.

Now here's the important thing. A telescope rotates on its axis, right? The azimuth. It points up and down in altitude, rotates on its azimuth. Called alt/az. But you have a tonne of cables feeding up through the azimuth up to the top. You can't unlimited spin the telescope around, or you'd rip up all the electronic equipment! You're limited to approx 500 degrees of movement before the telescope has to un-spin and release the tension on all the cables.

Makes sense, right?

On the intermediate level, there's two parts to the room. And this is VERY important. You see, the roof is part of the upper level: IT MOVES. THE FLOOR DOES NOT MOVE.

This bears repeating.

THE CEILING MOVES. THE FLOOR DOES NOT MOVE.

Because of this, electronics related to the telescope level are suspended by the ceiling because their wiring are fed up through the roof. Also, there is a guard rail around the room keeping people casually away from the boxes around the side of the room. It's easy enough to get around them if you need to work on them, and there are telescope motor lockout buttons if you work there to prevent the telescope/dome motors from moving when you're working on equipment.

So. To review. Electric/electronic cabling goes up through the telescope pedestal, equipment is suspended from the floor of the telescope, making it the ceiling of the intermediate level, and the telescope can rotate on its azimuth no more than about a full turn and a half or so before it has to counter-rotate to de-spool.

Remember the group from [CENSORED]?

My wife worked with them on-site Monday, Tuesday, and most of Wednesday. With her was a part-time grad student from NMSU. He comes into the control room and tells Russet that you need to come upstairs and see something.

That's never a good sign!

The yahoos from [CENSORED], on the intermediate level, UNBEKNOWNST to Russet, had installed some electronic equipment on the intermediate level. And run conduit up to the ceiling pass-through, apparently stringing cable to their instrument on the telescope level.

Their equipment was sitting on the floor.

And the telescope had been merrily turning back and forth all night long!

Cabling was stretched and draped all over the place.

Fortunately nothing was damaged, though it was close to pulling on some switches which could have had some Consequences. It hadn't even pulled out of [CENSORED]'s boxes! Apparently they'd had A LOT of slack sitting there! They got really lucky!

*sigh*

All they had to do was put it in a cabinet that was already suspended. There's several cabinets that have open space, ready to be used. All they had to do was talk to the day staff engineers. But no, they had to be sneaky bastards and do things without talking to the people on-site. And make a mess, and potentially damage very expensive things.