18/12/2012

Green across the board.

The winter '12 service trip ends today. We've finished all of our scheduled work and the telescope is operating well. Possibly even more satisfying for us, our system monitoring package is all happy.

17/12/2012

The trouble with domes.. part 2

As I've mentioned before, checking the dome is a part of the regular maintenance work we do on the Tenerife trips. We moved the dome around as usual and listened for noises that shouldn't be there.

16/12/2012

A night in the life of the Bradford Robotic Telescope

A few years back we had an issue where the telescope was taking a lot of pictures of the inside of the dome. In the end we found that there was a problem with the mount configuration and we got everything working well again. In the process of trying to debug the problem we created a number of tools to help with the diagnosis. One of these tools was a script which the controlserver runs before it starts each imaging job.

15/12/2012

The trouble with domes..

On our maintenance trips to Tenerife one of the things we always have to check is the dome. Our system operates every night with good weather, and the dome rotates in the day to keep the solar panels pointing at the sun too.. all in all it has a pretty hard life.

Timing

The timing for starting this blog is a bit poor. It was one of those ideas that has lingered in my mind for a while, but I haven't really had the time to do the research or set the thing up. I am at the moment on a maintenance trip to the observatory in Tenerife, which would seem like a perfect time to start blogging about my work on the telescope.

First Post!

Welcome to my blog..