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Almost first light

Aug 7, 2009

Ok, so yesterday was bit of a struggle.  Not much progress was made due to network issues but they seem to be solved now.  We've been up the mountain for 10 hours doing some work but we're only just now about to start looking at some stars through the 0.4m!  The south 0.4m is all set up but the North has a technical issue which the Santa Barbara guys are working on.   Edward will be controlling the camera, Wayne will control the interface which controls the telescope and I am going to be learning how we fix the telescope specific problems.  Then we'll split into two teams and get going on both at the same time.  We're running out of time in a sense, since we only have two nights left (including tonight) to set everything right.  This was mostly a consequence of the network issues (so we can say it wasn't our fault!), but that will all change if we mess up the telescope so that everything is out of focus and blurred... the scientists and engineers at Santa Barbara will not be impressed with us unless we arrive back with some excellent imaging telescopes.

 We'll find out very soon what the first images from Haleakala look like, fingers crossed!