Maintenance Trip June 2014: Mount rebuild timelapse

Each summer we re-grease the Ra and Dec drives on the mount as a part of our routine maintenance. This year we decided the make a timelapse video of the process to show everybody what we get up to on the maintenance trips.

Telescope Operation

Over the last fortnight the operation of the telescope has been somewhat disrupted. This reduction in the capacity of the service has been a result of two unconnected reasons.

Dome code development
The first of the reasons is development of new code to control the dome. Over the last six months we have have made various improvements to the code controlling the dome in an attempt to minimise its impact on images. The dome now attempts to track the mount as it moves in real time through the imaging process. We are hoping to add new code soon which will make the dome aware of the extent to which the dome is obscuring the imaging camera, this will allow the dome to make more intelligent decisions about when it is necessary to rotate to follow the camera.

The changes to the dome code have resulted in a large increase in the amount of communication with the dome, and also have changed the communication from happening in a single thread, to requests coming in from multiple threads. The existing dome control code is thread safe, however the increase in communication appears to now be overwhelming the dome controller; this problem has necessitated a change in the way in which we communicate with the dome. The alterations to the dome control code have required numerous changes throughout the system. Testing and refining of this code has required frequent restarts of the controlserver software. In some circumstances the restart of the controlserver software resets the cool count of the system to zero, this effectively takes the Galaxy camera off-line as it waits to cool again. Whilst this is frustrating, the system does continue to image on the Constellation and Cluster cameras, minimising the amount of lost observing time. I have talked with Chris and believe that we now have a way to indicate on the website when new code development is happening.

Mount pointing errors
We have recently started to have pointing errors with the mount. We are still working to understand the cause of these errors. The system is designed to reject images which have a pointing error in excess of certain predetermined values. Whilst we continue to work on this problem a larger than normal number of the images taken on Galaxy camera will be rejected and discarded by the system. These rejected images are shown in the RTD feed, but their imaging is not recorded in the list of work undertaken in the last night's jobs page; this often makes it looks like the system hasn't done much work in a night.

We have not reached the end of the dome code development cycle, or resolved the mount pointing errors yet. As we move forward with the work we hope to keep you all a bit better informed about what is going on.

Maintenance Trip Feb 2014 Part 2: More snow.. and a drive around the Observatory

This blog post is going to be a bit of a cheat as I haven't had time to prepare something more substantial. This week I've got some videos for you. On the last trip we filmed the whole of our commute up the mountain in the snowy conditions. I have made a couple of short clips which I hope you all enjoy.

Maintenance Trip Feb 2014 Part 1: Ice, snow and operating the telescope

We have now returned to the UK from our first maintenance trip of 2014. The maintenance trip will be memorable for us for a number of reasons. A lot happened on the trip so instead of a single round up post, I will spread the news over a number of posts in the coming weeks.

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.