BRT Observatory Link Down.. Update

This morning we were greeted with further network failures affecting the IAC weather station and their on site web cameras, however as the day have progressed we have seen a number of systems coming back on-line.

BRT Observatory Link Down..

At roughly 20:30 on the 11th of December we lost communication with the BRT observatory at the Observatorio del Teide, shortly after at around 21:05 we lost communication with our night sky webcam.

Ra trailing update

Trailing in the Ra axis was a noticeable problem with our images in the weeks leading up to the hardware failures in Tenerife. This post talks about the diagnostic work and repairs that were completed to resolve this issue.

Tenerife emergency maintenance update - September 2013

We arrived on site to make emergency repairs to the system on the 7th of September, since that date we have been working hard to bring the system back on line.

Dome update

With help from the observatory maintenance team, we have located the source of the dome Az drive problem.

Dome offline

We currently have a problem with the azimuth drive of the dome which is preventing operation.

Long overdue blog post...

This is my first blog post in a very long time.. too long to be honest.
At the end of the observatory maintenance trip the whole team returned to the UK and buried our heads in paperwork and attempts to make the system run well.

Telescope Pointing Errors Update

We started the telescope on a mapping run last night. The first ~20 points looked very good, but then the dome stopped responding to commands to rotate. The dome shutter could be opened and closed, but the dome could not be rotated

Telescope Homing Errors

With help from Don and Steve at Software Bisque we believe that we have now resolved the problems with homing our mount.

Sumer Maintenance Trip 2013 Update

So far the summer maintenance trip has been very busy for me, so I've not had a great deal of time to blog about my work.. but today I am going to make some time.

Summer Maintenance Trip 2013

As I write this post we are flying parallel to the coast of Africa, heading to Tenerife for the summer maintenance visit.

Telescope pointing update

I have made progress towards resolving the telescope pointing issue on a number of fronts over the past week.

Webcam failures.. Resolved!

We this assistance of the IAC maintenance team we have been able to bring the webcams back online.

Telescope pointing

As a result of the recent poor pointing performance of the telescope I have been experimenting with the use of plate solving to monitor the pointing performace.

Cloud detection

The current problems with the web cam systems are affecting the operation of the cloud detection used by the weather station.

Webcam failures

We are currently experiencing problems with a number of webcams at the observatory. The cameras off line are Road cam, Teide cam, Dome cam, Pier cam, Pole star cam, Teide star cam, and Puerto cam.

Observatorio del Teide open doors day 2013

The dates for the 2013 Observatorio del Teide open doors days are the 21st and 22nd of June.

Telescope Downtime

Over the last few days we have seen pointing errors in the images being returned from the telescope.

In the next couple of days we are planning to take the telescope offline for a part of the night to investigate the problem and perform a mapping run. We will aim to bring the telescope back on-line before the end of the evening.

BRT de-iced yet again...

It would appear that not even Tenerife can escape the never ending winter that we seem to be having this year.

BRT Observatory Network Restored

The observatory maintenance team have repaired the network fault and restored the connection to our building.

BRT Observatory Network Failure Update

This morning I have connected to the observatory using a low bandwidth connection to find further information about the nature of the problem, these are my findings...

BRT Observatory Network Down

The network link to the BRT Observatory is currently down.

BRT de-iced.. again..

The dome is now de-iced and the system returned to operation last night.

BRT now re-iced!

After the bad weather last night the dome is iced up again. The heaters are enabled and we hope to return to operation soon.

Blog timeline issues..

You may have noticed that the order of posts in my blog have change round a bit.. and that the posting times may have changed too.

Here is why...

BRT now de-iced!

After the recent bad weather at the observatory we found last night that our dome had iced up. The dome could not rotate or open, forcing us to stop the system from operating last night.

Bad weather at the Tenerife Observatory

The telescope will not be operating tonight. The cold weather and snow fall last night has iced up the dome preventing it from turning or opening.

An eerie silence...

You may have noticed that recently I've been bad at keeping to my plan of publishing at least one blog post a week. To be honest, I've been working though my pile of ready written filler blog posts.

Teide Stars Image Blank

You may have noticed last weekend that the images from the Teide star camera were coming back blank. We believed that the problem is with the new Sun shutter that was fitted in the December maintenance trip.

Cluster camera focus

Cluster camera sits in the middle of our range of fields of view at 4 degrees. The lens is a 180mm Nikkor which we have in the past manually focused. As the reliability of the system has improved we have been visiting the site less often to do maintenance and refocus the cameras; the result of this is that we have found the change in operating temperature between winter and summer is enough to effect the focus of the cluster camera. The solution to this.. find a way to automatically focus the camera. As with everything we do there is a vast difference between the simplicity of the statement, and the reality of the task.

Image trailing.. again...

The work so far in resolving the trailing problems has made a definite difference to the number of jobs returned with trailing in the image, but we are not happy yet.. So now it's time for the big hammer approach.

Teidestar camera sun shutter

For a long while now we've had two E2V L3Vision cameras which we use as nocturnal webcams. The cameras are extremely sensitive and can easily see stars and even see by star light. Over the last few years we started to see damage to the sensitivity of the chip following the line of the sun's progression through the sky. We eventually took the camera off line and sent it for repair by E2V. At this point we realised that we needed to do something to shield the camera from direct sunlight.

Image trailing update

I spent a while working on changing the order of exposures in the controlserver yesterday. As a result of this we are now imaging in the order suggested in the previous Image trailing post. The number of jobs completed last night was reasonably low due to cloud cover, but the initial results look promising.

Image trailing

From time to time we see images returned by the telescope which have trailing of the stars. With colour images we see the trailing in the red colour channel. The telescope images each colour channel separately in the order red (R), visible (V) and finally blue (B). The trailing in the R channel suggests that it is occurring at that start of imaging for the job.