When you want to see the stars, find someplace dark
Working atop The Mountain
What do we really spend our days doing on the mountain? Usually pretty mundane stuff, just fixing stuff and making improvements to the gear. A little peek into one of those improvements over at CFHT, a fiber run to allow the 8 meter Gemini telescope to feed a spectrograph next door at CFHT. Something not so mundane, rather fun actually…
Canada France Hawaii Telescope Graces Fiber Link with Gemini Telescope from CFHT on Vimeo.
Here is the video of last Friday’s presentation, Perspectives on the Future of Mauna Kea. Well worth the watch for anyone interesting in the issue. My thanks to Doug Simons for representing the observatories!
If there is any complaint about the camera work… My fault.
An impassioned argument is one thing. I realize that tempers can flare and some people may say things that they might otherwise not say. But strong emotion can also reveal the truth behind the facade that we all maintain. What is revealed under stress can be our finest or our worst.
My thanks to Ian Lind for covering this on his blog as well as posting the response from the Mauna Kea Hui. Sorry, this sort of behavior must be called out and condemned by those on both sides of the discussion.
A lot of emotion and bandwidth has been swirling around our mountain this past month. It has been unfortunate that two otherwise positive forces have collided atop one summit. Last night the local community had a chance to listen to various perspectives in a more personal and reasoned forum. The Honokaʻa Peoples Theater, located on the slopes of Mauna Kea is the perfect place for this to happen. An evening of face to face discussion.
The format was simple, a presentation by Hāwane Rios, explaining her perspective on growing up in the traditions of Mauna Kea. This was followed by a presentation by Doug Simons, executive director of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. After a 15 minute intermission there was another hour of panel discussion with questions provided by the audience. What started at 6pm went on until well after nine, with personal conversations that kept the theater a buzz until well after 11pm.
Unfortunately one of the featured speakers Lanakila Mangauli was unable to attend, having flown to Oahu for a hasty meeting with OHA and state officials. He was not completely absent, a Skype connection projected on the theater screen allowed him to give a short presentation at the start. After having watched video of his tirade (Yes, I will call it that!) at the TMT groundbreaking ceremony, I had been given a somewhat less than flattering opinion of him. The person who addressed the audience this night was much more impressive, giving an intelligent and reasoned argument to his cause. I wish he had been able to address the audience in person.
Doug Simons also related his personal connection to the mountain, having spent the last 30 years working, hunting and raising his family here in Waimea and on Mauna Kea. Starting with the great discoveries that have been accomplished by the telescopes atop Mauna Kea, Doug did an admirable job of covering the importance of the research done at the telescopes and why these great instruments belong to all of mankind.
I spent the evening listening and operating a production video camera we had brought over from Keck. CFHT, Subaru and Keck staff operated a battery of audio/visual gear, live casting the event on YouTube, recording video for later editing and managing a Skype connection for Lanakila. I expect we should have good videos up shortly, they are definitely worth watching by anyone interested in the issues surrounding our mountain. The presentation by Hāwane should be worth watching just to hear her sing. I will put the links here as soon as they become available.
Update… Check out the video here.
When powering up a nearly three decade old computer for the first time I should really have a video camera running…
The loud pop, and the stream of smoke issuing from the side vents was bad enough. It was the ominous orange glow seen for just a couple seconds from the same vent that really sent me the message…
Not good.
Without this machine it will be very difficult to program the old PLC the dome runs on. I do have a replacement for that PLC controller running in my office, but I face the challenge of verifying the design, I would like to run the old software in the test setup to compare it to the new. I would also like to have a backup in case something goes wrong during the transition, a way of putting the old PLC back into the system and programming it.
Continue reading “A Pop, a Puff of Smoke, and an Ominous Red Glow… Not Good”
I work at the summit of a nearly 14,000ft mountain that sits atop a pretty tropical island. That alone is good enough reason to carry a camera at all times. You never know when you will need that camera, beauty appears when you least expect it.
The advent of digital cameras where the cost of each photo is negligible has made this possible. This would not have been practical in the days of film. Yes, I remember those days, counting out every frame of a 36 exposure roll, deciding if the shot was worth it. In this digital age I usually have a dedicated camera along and never worry about shooting. If that camera is out of reach there is always the iPhone in my pocket.
The equipment I work on is often unique, there may be only one copy in the world. Two if we have one installed on both Keck 1 and Keck 2. The documentation can be of varying quality, some is good, some is abysmal, some is just plain wrong. Some of this gear was professionally built by engineers, some of it was built by graduate students who would never need to fix it years later.
As the new year is well underway I find myself in the midst of my major project for this year. For the next few months I will be replacing the control system for the Keck 2 dome. The project is well underway, but the real work remains ahead of me.
Parts for the PLC/2 are still available, but the programming software is a real issue. The software runs on a DOS (as in pre-windows) operating system, and does not run under the emulation modes of later Microsoft systems. You need a real DOS computer, something that is a bit rare these days. If the controller running the Keck 2 dome were to fail, I am not certain we could repair it.
I have the computer that is used to do the programming in my office, an ancient Compaq Portable III. Portable is an odd word to use with this computer, it weighs over 20lbs and is huge by modern laptop standards. This museum piece still works! Last month I booted it up and wandered through the file system. At power up I was greeted by a monochrome amber screen and a DOS prompt. I still remember a few basic DOS commands, enough to check things out. It appears that all of the software and files are still present on the hard drive. Sometime I need to see if I can indeed program the old PLC/2. If something goes wrong in the update I need to be able to revert to the original control system.
Some parts of the job are simply fun. Installing the various upgrades to the weather system has been just that. The latest piece of kit being more fun than usual.
Even that is topped by the camera I installed this fall. The latest camera is a new pan-tilt-zoom camera attached to the weather mast.
The camera does have more prosaic reasons to justify the effort of installing it. With the camera the operators can observe the weather conditions around the telescope, observing supervisors can view the ice and snow on the domes from Waimea, the day crew can check the weather conditions before driving to the summit, and more. The camera does have enough sensitivity to see the brighter stars and the banks of fog that roll over the summit. In full dark and at full gain the image is noisy and faint, not all that great. Given just a little moonlight the performance is much better, allowing visibility of oncoming clouds.
Even more fun! On Christmas Eve I was contacted by Hawaii News Now for photos of the storm, they were eager to do something about a white Christmas for the evening news. As I had not been to the summit and no one on our crew was up, I simply grabbed some MastCam images and forwarded them. The images were aired in the first couple minutes of the Honolulu evening news!
The camera is not available to the public, it would be too much wear and tear to the pan-tilt mechanism and a huge hog of bandwidth. You have to be inside the Keck network to use, from there it is available to anyone on staff. It has proven quite popular, with many folks using the imagery to check on mountain conditions in the latest bad weather.
Next up, yet more cameras in the dome and even a couple on top of the domes. there is also a precipitation sensor and more in the works for the weather station.
OK, enough fun, back to revising the Keck 2 dome schematics.
The instruments were warming up. Liquid nitrogen exhausted, cooling interrupted by loss of power, the cryogenic dewars had begun to warm. Recovering instruments takes many days of vacuum pumps and re-cooling to restore function if cooling has been loss. Other problems caused by the storm and power outages plagued the summit, some systems not responding to remote queries.
Sunday offered at least a hope of making it to the summit. The storm had abated and beautiful sunny skies appeared over the summit. We readied for an attempt at the summit of Mauna Kea. As the engineer on call I would join the support techs at the summit. Maybe we could salvage something from the chaos.