Hey everyone
So, let me fill you in on what's been happening over the last week or so ...
The KELT South telescope finally arrived in Sutherland all safe and sound. It was only delayed by almost three weeks, so considering Africa time I'd say it's kinda right on schedule :) The telescope arrived on Tuesday (16 September 2008) and Josh and David were very excited. It's kinda disturbing seeing two grown men act like little kids on Christmas morning, but I suppose it's to be expected. They have spent many hours behind the scenes getting the telescope ready and testing various pieces of hardware.
Before Tuesday though, Josh and I have been coding many pieces of VBScript that we will use to automate the telescope. It's not until one starts writing the code that one realises that there are a lot more things to consider than you initially thought. So far I've been working on the Weather Script. This piece of code is probably one of the more important pieces because this code will read weather information from a couple of sources here in Sutherland and decide whether the telescope should actually open to start the observing run (and you don't want to be opening the enclosure in the middle of a thunder storm). The code is slowly coming to a point where I feel comfortable to load it on the control computer, but we will be doing many hours of testing before we leave the telescope to itself :) You can never trust that you have considered all the possibilities.
Tuesday morning/afternoon when the telescope finally arrived (at around 12pm) there was a lot of commotion as the truck that the crate was on, was slightly larger then we expected and the only place that we could actually offload the crate was at the SALT unloading dock. This meant that we roped all the SALT engineers and technical staff into helping us unload our little telescope. They must've been thinking very strange thoughts when they found out that our telescope was only a glorified camera, when they are used to working on the single largest telescope in the Southern hemisphere with equipment weighing in at many thousands of kilograms. When we finally got the crate off the large truck, we needed another vehicle to load it onto. The job was given to the trusty old Toyota One Tonner. The next big job involved offloading the crate from this vehicle and then unpacking the entire crate. This went rather well and we actually managed to dismantle the entire crate in just over an hour. There is a awesome little video of us unpacking the crate on the KELT-South Wiki (http://keltsouth.pbwiki.com/). We also had to decide where we were going to set up all the equipment and perform the initial testing of the hardware as well as our code to operate the telescope. We managed to get access to the visitors centre library and we decided to move the control computer, UPS, transformer, camera and mount into the library. By the end of the move, it was supper time and straight after supper we started planning out the rest of the week.
On Wednesday, Josh and I spent a large part of the day setting up the UPS and transformer in the library at the visitors centre. This will serve as our little lab for the next couple of days until the electrical lines have been pulled into the telescope enclosure (which we are hoping should be done by either Monday or Tuesday 22/23 September). It took us a really long time to actually figure out the entire UPS and transformer layout because the manuals that were included with these things weren’t really very explanatory. We had to ask Jaci (SAAO Electrical Engineer) and John Stoffels (Sutherland Site Manager) many questions that they probably thought were very easy, and things that every person (nevermind highly schooled astronomers) should know.
Thursday was spent finalising a lot of things with the builder and making sure that the cables and lights and doors and things were going to be fitted within a reasonable time frame. I was still working on the Weather Script and in the afternoon Josh and I started working on the Preparation Script. We also got the mount and the camera unpacked and hooked up to the UPS. The Preparation Script will execute about an hour before astronomical twilight and make sure that everything with the telescope and mount are OK. It will then take the bias frames and slew the telescope into a position where it will take the flat fields. Josh and I were also very excited to see the mount move for the first time by us issuing it a VBScript command.
Friday morning was spent adding some final touches to the Weather Script and just before lunch time we headed back to the hostel to see David off. He had to leave to make sure he got back to Hawaii before Monday when he started teaching again. I actually felt very sorry for him because he had come all this way to never see the telescope actually get installed. We promised to send him as many photos as possible and keep the Wiki site updated to ensure that he could at least track the progress. We will need his expertise over the next couple of days when we finally get the telescope into the enclosure and start testing the operations. The rest of the day was spent figuring out how the entire telescope will operate.
And that is the story so far. Hopefully I will have slightly more time to keep everyone updated on our progress, because another monster post like this one takes far too much time and effort :)
Have a good one people
