22/02/2013

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...

20/02/2013

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.

19/02/2013

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.

07/02/2013

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.