In a word: Moof

Trying to return home from Tucson at the moment, but I’ve been trapped in first Tallahassee, now Atlanta. Just when our flight from Tucson was nearing Atlanta (where we had a layover), thunderstorms forced the airport to close. So we spun around in a holding stack for a while, until we had to divert to Tallahassee for fuel. That took almost two hours (by this time its 10pm, when our flight was supposed to arrive around 7.)

We eventually made it to Atlanta, where much to our surprise, our flight to Cleveland was merely four-hours delayed, not canceled. Waited around til the new departure time of 12:30. They then announced a gate change, and sent all the passengers from two separate flights to a gate at the far end of the terminal. The confused employee at the new gate knew nothing of either flight, nor why about two hundred people had suddenly appeared at her gate. Calls were made to the tower. Both planes were then sent back to their original gates at the other end of the terminal, which just topped off the hilarity.

And then they canceled the flight. Turns out the pilots for the flight had flown as long as they are legally allowed to in one day. Everyone runs from the gate to the nearest long line they can find. Most people picked the line for hotel vouchers or for flight rescheduling; we picked the line for taxis. Found a hotel, and went to bed around 2am.

Woke up at 7:30, since we were on standby for a flight at 9-something. Didn’t make that one. Didn’t make the one at 12:50. The rest in the afternoon are full. I finally ended up with a ticket at 9:55pm. So I have plenty of time in the crown room to kill.

That story was dull, so hopefully this picture will make it better:

Kitt Peak attacks.

So the main goal of this trip was to replace one of the motors on the telescope. We had been using the telescope’s original motor (from 1941), but we got a new and much fancier servo motor to use instead. I programmed the new motor in Cleveland to be mostly compatible with the old one, and we shipped it to Tucson a few days before we were going to arrive, just to avoid carrying the heavy motor on the plane. When we arrived in Tucson, what a surprise, no package. First Fedex claimed that it was stuck in Memphis, and that they were having problems getting planes out of the airport there. The next day they admitted it was lost. Two weeks after it was shipped (and not by two-week air), we still don’t have it.

But we’re in an isolated observatory, how are we going to get another one? Well, we have spares of everything., including this motor. So we uncovered an identical motor, already here in the observatory. So we managed to work around the shipping failure, and got the motor installed. Much wiring then ensued, along with the disassembly of the gearbox the motor attaches to. The gearbox is another Warner and Swasey 1941 original, and was probably part of a battleship gun turret before it was a telescope drive. So even the covers on the gearbox are half-inch thick steel. Removing huge hunks of steel that are mounted ten feet off the ground is not particularly easy. Plus we repeatedly assembled the gears in the wrong order, so fixing the gearbox turned out to be an entire night of work (we probably started around 7pm, gave up at midnight, and spent another hour the next morning).

I don’t have many pretty pictures to post, but here’s the motor:

Back on the mountain. We’re in the middle of the monsoon season here, so there are frequent thunderstorms. They’re short-lived and though, and can be seen from miles away. From the mountain I could see three different thunderstorms earlier this afternoon, all of them far enough away that the lightning couldn’t be heard. They’re huge lightning bolts though. All this weather makes for poor observing conditions, but terrible conditions here would be amazing conditions for Cleveland. We’re in the middle of replacing the motor on the declination axis, so we can’t do any observing anyways. Maybe later.

Random story time: the most recent visitors to the Schmidt before us were here in early July. When they left, they set the dishwasher to run. Reasonable thing to do, except that we have semi-frequent power outages. So before the dishwasher could run, the power failed, and the dishwasher wasn’t smart enough to resume cleaning. So the dirty dishes sat there for a month. I opened the dishwasher yesterday to find quite a colony of mold taking over all the plates. Not just spots, this was enough mold to make a hearty meal. So we just ran the cycle a few times with as much detergent as we could fit in, and that restored the plates to a mostly sanitary state. But the bottom line is that I don’t feel as bad for leaving dirty dishes all over the kitchen of my suite in Cleveland. They may have been dirty, but they weren’t nearly as bad as these plates.

Looks something like this:

That picture was taken on the Case 9.5 inch telescope on top of A.W. Smith, connected to a Nikon D40 camera. The cluster has a magnitude of 5.8, so it would be a naked-eye object if we were not in the middle of Cleveland. But we are, so we have to use a telescope and a thirty-second exposure to get a decent shot of it. That’s the longest exposure the camera can handle, as the noise becomes more and more significant. I could combine several images together to get one nice shot, but that is rather obnoxious to do with consumer cameras (The bayer filter, which gives you color information, causes most of the frustration. And IRAF doesn’t handle three-color images very well, so that adds to the difficulty).

Now, to explain what is actually in the image. It’s the Hercules globular cluster, also known as Messier 13. It’s a group of stars in our galaxy that all formed from the same cloud of gas at roughly the same time. It’s 8 kiloparsecs away from us (26,000 light years), which is about one sixth of the diameter of the Milky Way.

Hopefully I’ll have some better pictures from Kitt Peak to put up soon. I still have all the data for an image of M101; I just need to make it into a nice picture.