An argument broke out at lunch today over how many days we’ve actually been here. Luckily we have a blog, so we just looked it up.
As the Guanaco noticed, Mario and Frederico have left us after more than pulling their weight. They took the early bus to La Serena.
Frederico, Laird, and Mario just before the boys from Microgate left for their long journey back to Bolzano. Thanks guys.
Now that the TSS is fixed, we moved on to mounting our windscreen. This is just a metal ring that encircles the bottom of the ASM to protect the shell from high wind. We also removed a set of shims from the mounting system.
The windscreen about to be lifted into place. This requires some fine alignment since our calibration system hangs from it.
If you're going to have someone climb on top of your ASM, it should be Armando.
The ASM with the windscreen.
In the afternoon Laird spent some time perfecting the routing of cables to the W-Unit. This is a hard problem – the whole thing translates in 3 dimensions, and has to be able to turn upside down, and cables tugging on optics generally ruins nights.
We had to make a few adjustments to the cable housing to get enough flexibility.
The final product.
This is for Enrico. After dinner we cleaned some dust off our WFS side fold mirror, and recorded these white light images. Pupils look great, and the SDSS i' is in focus. Click to enlarge.
Today’s quote: “You know Laird, you need to seriously think about hiring an exorcist.” (Armando Riccardi, commenting on Jared’s project long bad luck with electronics).
The remaining 4. Click for a rotated image - we leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine the correct orientation of this image.
A nice shot by Laird of newly snow-capped peaks. The big storm improved the view a bit, once we could see it.