The board of the W. M. Keck Observatory is pleased to announce that Hilton Lewis has been appointed Director of Keck Observatory, effective immediately. He has served as the Interim Director since May.
Hilton Lewis, Director, W. M. Keck Observatory, credit Ethan Tweedie“The board is delighted that Hilton has agreed to take on this substantial responsibility,” said Ed Stolper, Chairman of the California Association for Research in Astronomy board, which manages Keck Observatory. “In his many years of service at Keck Observatory, and in the past four months as its Interim Director, Hilton has demonstrated his technical, managerial and leadership skills, and his commitment to the observatory. We are pleased that we have been able to attract such an outstanding and experienced leader to serve as our next Director”.
“We are delighted to welcome Hilton Lewis as the new Director of Keck Observatory. Hilton has a deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for the observatory, a thorough knowledge of its workings, and the strategic vision to keep Keck Observatory at the forefront of astronomical research,” said UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal, who also serves as the vice chair of the Keck Observatory board.
When most folks work late at the office it is a boring evening at a desk staring at a computer. I may have stared at a computer a bit, but it was hardly a boring evening.
A focusing test shot from the Keck CloudCamThe task that had me staying late was to focus the new cloud camera. To accomplish this task I needed a dark sky and stars. The plan is the same as I have used before, work the day and then stay into the evening.
Waiting for darkness had it’s advantages, an opportunity to do a little photography. In addition to the usual tool bag and lunch I took my camera gear with me.
With Sniffen on the roof while I watched the frames on the computer, I called the corrections up to him on the radio. It is tricky work to focus a fast lens, made worse by the need to do it remotely. We had to wait for each 30 second exposure, painfully slow. I hesitated to ask Sniffen to sit much longer out in the cold, but he was game and ready to assist. His tiny adjustments were deftly made, I watched as the lens moved through focus.
The summer Milky Way soars over the VLBA antenna atop Mauna KeaThe focus is not as good as I would like to see, I suspect that the Sigma 18mm f/1.8 lens leaves a little to be desired when used wide open. Perhaps one of the Rokinon lenses would work better. Or maybe I just need to step the lens down a stop or two.
After leaving Keck I took my time wandering down the mountain. I stopped at IRTF for a set of panorama shots. One of the first things I noted was the lack of airglow. Last time I shot from the summit the airglow was intense. Despite using the same camera and lens, with the same settings, the bright red glow was missing. Only a pale green near the horizon to be seen in the shots.
On a whim, I drove out to the VLBA antenna for a set of shots. This radio telescope was something different than the usual telescope shots I take. I walked around the dish until I could position the summer Milky Way beside the antenna. As the VLBA is a radio telescope there was no issue in using a little light from my flashlight to paint the dish and illuminate it for the photo.
I arrived home just before midnight, tired from a full day on the summit. The photos will wait for another day for processing.
It works! We now have a CloudCam at Keck. It is not quite ready for full active service, but it is alive and taking images. I got the network connection running yesterday, after mounting the camera and running the various cables over the last couple weeks. A little time for commissioning and getting the software setup and the camera will be available to everyone.
The housing for the Keck CloudCam ready for the worst in Mauna Kea weather.
Our camera was built by Kanoa over at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope. Kanoa built the first CloudCam that has served CFHT so well. In service for a couple years now, the CFHT CloudCam gives our telescope operators an unparalleled view of the weather. This is critically important as heavy fog, rain or snow can damage the telescope optical coatings.
To secure and protect the enclosure Kanoa built I fabricated a solid mount. A heavy machined plate and an aluminum cover should shield the camera from the worst that Mauna Kea Weather can dish out. The camera electronics warm the box nicely and a heater is installed to warm and deice the window. We shall see how it fares, the summit weather can be amazing.
With the original CloudCam pointing east, over Hilo, our CloudCam points west, a complementary view of the weather approaching the summit from either direction. The imagery will be closely monitored by all of the telescope operators on the summit during marginal weather.
The imagery will be available to the public as well. Expect live images as well as compiled movies of each night. The first CloudCam has quite a following, quite a few people check the camera constantly. This includes quite a few UFO consipracists. If anything odd shows up on the camera the video quickly shows up on YouTube and linked to postings on the UFO sites.
Yes, the focus needs to be adjusted (I expected that), but the scene covers a nice range from the Waikoloa resorts on the left, past Kawaihae, to Waimea on the right.
A test image from the Keck CloudCam
And after focus adjustment we get much nicer stars…
A CloudCam image showing the lights of Waikoloa, Waimea, and a lot of evening inter-island air traffic.
TBAD is our Transponder Based Aircraft Detector, used to avoid illuminating an aircraft with the AO laser. A specially designed receiver that uses an antenna at the front of each telescope to detect the TCAS anti-collision transponder that is carried by all commercial and most civil aircraft.
The Keck 2 AO laser works the northern skyThe odds of our painting an aircraft with the laser is astonishingly small. There is very little air traffic over the summit, those aircraft taking off and landing on the island have descended to well below 14,000ft before approaching. It is also a very large sky in which an aircraft is a very small target. Even if we managed, somehow, to paint the aircraft, the effects would be minor to unnoticed. Essentially the same as shining a bright light on the bottom of the plane. I have stood in the high power beam, strong sunlight feels much warmer.
Still, we are mandated to avoid the situation and to put in place measures to avoid such an occurrence. Before TBAD this involved hiring guys to sit outside and watch the skies for aircraft. I have done this, it can be pretty on a clear night with calm weather. It can be brutal on a cold and windy night. Even when taking precautions such as rotating two spotters every hour or two there is always the question of human fallibility under adverse conditions. Using an automated system like TBAD is far preferable.
My father-in-law made a career of repairing the heavy machinery of the local plywood and paper mills in the lumber and farming community of LaGrande, Oregon. Large machines such as high speed saws, conveyors, process tanks and more. One evening he was working with something I did not recognize and I made the mistake of asking what it was.
A snippet of the Keck 1 local controls ladder logicOver the kitchen table were spread the printouts of an arcane programming language, what I learned was called ladder logic. This sort of programming is a throwback to a day when control systems were built from dozens, or even hundreds, of electromechanical relays wired together to perform complex tasks. The relays are gone, replaced by a microcontroller, the programming language remains. It really does look like a ladder, drawn the same as the wiring diagrams used for those banks of relays. Each function, or rung, is filled with symbols for relay contacts and coils.
As a computer engineering student I was appalled that anyone would program this way, I could not conceive of using such a backwards seeming technology. Why not just use a simple programming language like C to build the functions? Ladder logic was the worst sort of programming language, no abstraction, no compartmentalization, prone to building hard to understand spaghetti code.
An Allen-Bradley PLC-2 that controls the Keck 2 dome and shuttersThe ladder logic program is downloaded to a device called a PLC, or programmable logic controller. Usually a rack of cards with a controller at one end and a set of input/output modules filling the remainder of the rack. The PLC takes the code and executes it, scanning the inputs and following the rules set in the logic to switch the outputs. connected the the various push-buttons, limit switches, motors and lights, the PLC can control a huge range of industrial equipment. These devices are the workhorses of entire factories, and often observatories.
Jumping ahead more than a decade… I now find myself using this same technology and programming in ladder logic. Many of the critical systems at Keck use PLC’s for control. The dome controllers, local controls and various safety systems use PLC’s to accomplish the task. Some of these systems are over two decades old, and for the most part spares can still be purchased.
The technology is not dead, far from it. The new telescope control systems currently being designed will feature modern ControlLogix PLC’s to implement the critical safety functions. There are dozens of interlocks throughout the telescope, switches that detect the condition of the system and prevent bad things from happening. If a lock pin is not installed, if a drawbridge is down or a crane not stowed properly, the telescope does not move.
Never mind me, I am just reading a twenty year old user manual, learning how to set the serial communications on a PLC-5.
By the time you get to this point you are almost there, you are also out of breath from climbing the vertical ladders. The price of getting to the top of the Keck 1 dome.
Also a good spot to take a photo while catching your breath…
Looking up the stairway to the top of the Keck 1 dome
A job that takes me high inside the dome, installing a test antenna for TBAD. Going so far up in the basket is always a treat, the view of the telescope is great. A view few people ever get to see…
Looking down on the Keck 1 telescope from the manlift basket.
