We finished preparations for the telescope installation yesterday. All the pier holes are finished, and the domes, lift tables, and hoists are all operational. The cranes also arrived yesterday. (We are using two cranes: a large crane to do the lifting and a smaller crane with a flatbed to pull the parts from the containers and transload them to the sites.) The small crane arrived at the observatory last night, while the large crane made it as far as the park entrance since it needed to be delivered on a large flatbed trailer. This morning we began the work of transloading the telescope pedestal, fork, trusses, HA counterweight, and the spreader bar to lift the primary mirror cell, while another guy from the crane crew went back to the park entrance to get the big crane. Unfortunately, the big crane had a problem with the fuel pump so it could not get up here this morning. Good news is, one of the SPM mechanics went back down to the park entrance and was able to fix it, and the crane arrived at the observatory late this afternoon. We did not have any time to do any lifting, but we will start early tomorrow morning. We expect to get everything in place by the end of the day.

A hurricane just made landfall today in Cabo San Lucas, and it is heading this way. So we are expecting a couple days of heavy rain up here starting tomorrow evening. So our goal is to get all of the large parts of the first telescope lifted into place tomorrow so we can work inside the dome and put everything together during the rain (as long as the storm is not too severe, of course). We plan to resume the crane work on Monday or Tuesday once the rains stop and any necessary repairs are made to the access roads.

Here are some photos of the transloading.

Rigging the pedestal to drag it out of the shipping container.

Dragging out the pedestal with the small crane.

Preparing for the lift.

Starting the lift.

Pedestal out of the container.

Setting pedestal down on flatbed.

Rigging the fork to pull it out of the container.

Dragging out the fork while the crane takes much of the weight.

Ready for the lift.

Fork out of the container.

Ian rotating the fork.

Fork going on the flatbed.

Trusses going on the flatbed.

Justus helping me get the counterweight assembly out of the container.

Everything strapped down and ready to go to the site.

Flatbed/crane on road to Site #2.

First load successfully delivered to the site, and ready for lifting tomorrow morning.