KELT South begins

Hey everyone

The time has arrived for us to start on the construction of the telescope. The telescope isn't here in Sutherland yet, but there are many things we need to do before it arrives. We are hoping to take delivery of the equipment on Saturday (13 September) or Sunday. Then the real fun and games are gonna begin :)

At the moment we are writing some control software for the telescope, and my main job is to get the weather information from all the weather stations up on the hill and make sure the telescope observes when it should and close the roof when it should. Trying to figure out VBScript in the process as well. The learning curve is very steep, but I didn't expect anything less.

The men responsible for the KELT telescope, Joshua Pepper (from Vanderbilt University) and David James (from The University of Hawaii), are here in Sutherland as well. David will be responsible for the flat field screen and imaging and making sure the telescope performs as expected. Josh and I are responsible for everything else. And the "everything else" is a fairly long list to say the least. The photo above shows David on the left and Josh on the right trying to figure out how to use the camcorder they brought along to document the telescope construction. There is also some snow in the background (again). David was busy applying primer to the hardboard we will use to construct the flat field screen.

You can follow the progress and access some more technical details here: http://keltsouth.pbwiki.com/

Hope all is well
Cheers