This week, I have been lucky enough to be asked to go out to the Haleakala site in Maui by LCOGT to help commission the telescopes. As an astrophysicist, I often analyze images from telescopes (mostly ones which work in the far-infrared range, including telescopes which sit on top of another extinct volcano on the Hawaiian islands - Mauna Kea on Big Island). This process is a little detached, my data comes through (usually) as a service mode which means someone else has actually sat at the telescope controls and observed my source with the help of the wonderful support Astronomers at the telescopes. I receive my data on a computer, I work on it using a computer and (if I'm lucky) get to publish any exciting results, you guessed it, using a computer. So, I was very excited to be asked to go along to actually help commission some telescopes, for once having the opportunity to do some hands-on astronomy, something I have never experienced before. How successful I'll be at helping out, I just don't know, I can't tell my "Alt"s from my "El"s, "fratio"s from my focal planes and don't even talk to me about polar axes and finding North.
Right now, we're inside the FTN enclosure with Edward, Mark (the site manager), Wayne and Jacob. Jacob and Wayne have been working hard on getting all the electronics set up and we should hopefully start running some tests to check the alignment, collimation, focus, pointing, drifts and camera quality. So far this morning, Jacob and I put some washers underneath the mount of the telescope to make the frame easier to adjust from one point, and now the electrics are being finalised. It involved scrambling about at height on a very sturdy truss, fortunately my feet are small.
So here's to some fully-commissioned, excellent imaging 0.4 telescopes before the week is out. I'll keep you posted.
