Blog

Today we finished all of the crane work at Site #3. We started this morning with the fork and the primary mirror cell/center section/focus housing bundle, and after lunch we lifted everything else: counterweights, Dec drive, electronics rack, trusses, and lots of boxes using a nifty cargo bag that Liliana provided. We will start on Site #1 tomorrow morning.Here are some photos. Not too many today, since most of them look like those from the work at Site #2. Lifting fork out of container and onto flatbed. Getting primary mirror cell/center section/focus housing stack out of container. At Site...

Yesterday it was misting most of the day so we did not do any crane work. Instead we continued the work on the lift table modifications. Today, however, was very sunny, so we were able to finish the crane work at Site #2.  We also had time to install the pedestal at Site #3, and weather permitting, we expect to finish most, if not all, of the crane work at that site tomorrow.We started the day by lifting the spyder ring and focus housing, after which we separated the center section from the primary mirror cell and lifted and installed it. (The mirror cell stays on the ground floor until t...

    The TAOS II camera mechanical parts have been made and integrated for some time. This is the first attempt to populate the sensors on the cold plate. This is to confirm that the cold plate design is consistent with the CMOS sensor package and also to check the procedure of the sensor installation with the tool we developed. In the process, we used the mechanical sample...

Lidia has arrived at SPM. Winds were too high this morning for any crane work, so we went ahead and fixed a problem we noticed yesterday with the lift table at Site #2, namely that the table wouldn't clear the fork when raised high enough to get the primary mirror cell onto the center section. So we cut off the two corners of the table nearest the telescope, and the problem is now solved.We need to make the same modification to the other two lift tables, but by the time we finished at Site #2, the winds had started to pick up enough that we decided to bug out for the day and head back to the d...

We installed the first pieces of the telescope at Site #2 today. The pedestal and fork are now in place, along with the HA and fork counterweights. The crane had another fuel line issue this morning after the installation of the pedestal, so we went and unloaded the rest of the parts from the container while the mechanic fixed the problem. While finishing the installation of the fork, the weather turned bad so we closed up the dome and headed back to the dormitory until things cleared up. We were able to install some counterweights on the fork this afternoon, as well as get the HA drive mecha...

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 pedest...

I got back to SPM yesterday with Ian Huss and Justus Drake from DFM Engineering to start work on the telescope installation. The crane will arrive in time to begin the heavy lifting Thursday morning, but we wanted to spend a couple days preparing. In short, we need to get all of the nuts, bolts, and various pieces of equipment required for the heavy lifting organized and put into place. In addition, we wanted to get the big parts in the containers ready for the lift, so we need to unbolt everything from the containers, and get the rigging set up as much as possible. Finally, we need to prepare...

I will arrive at SPM Monday afternoon August 28 with Ian and Justus from DFM Engineering. We will have a couple days of preparation work (drilling and tapping a few large holes in the piers), and the crane work will start on the 31st. We expect to finish all of the heavy lifting by September 8.

My trip to Mexico is over. We wrapped up a few things before I left. In no particular order:Electrical power:The transformer at Site #2 that brings power to Site #3 died, so no electricity at Site #3. Electrical crew should be replacing it this week, as well as installing a new and improved ground system at tall of the sites.Dome azimuth home switches:We got it installed correctly at Site #2. This was after we broke one of the switches because there was a low-hanging bolt on the hydraulics that I missed, it snapped off the top of the switch as it moved by while rotating the dome. We replaced t...

We officially completed the installation of the domes early this evening. We leveled each dome (or rather, we checked and found that they were installed level when we placed each dome on the top of the enclosures), installed some rubber sealing around the bases, greased up the dome tracks,  got all of the control boxes and cables hooked up, and tested that everything still worked. No photos today, all of the exciting stuff was during the past couple days, and there is nothing really new to see.I now plan to wrap up the remaining work on my list so I can get out of here for a little bit. Tomorr...