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:
—cts