Starship Asterisk*

I assume (for lack of looking) that the same motor-driven wheel is used in the CONCAM3 cameras as SBIG used in older models like the STV. If so, one could feasibly modify the shutter drive for those systems to allow an external circuit (photodiode looking at the outside sunlight + opamps) to run the...

My neighbor (a fine, upstanding citizen not given to UFO-ism :-) told me this weekend that he had seen a spectacular W->E meteor/fireball about 10 minutes after 10PM local on Friday night 3/11 (0810+/- 031205 UT). He described a classic, with a long greenish tail splitting into five smaller pieces n...

Over the weekend a power failure took out a router in the path from Haleakala to the Real World, so the network link to the mountain is down, though the concam is ok as far as I know (the failure was at the downhill end of the link). We have not yet heard any estimate of how long it will be out, but...

BTW, can someone remind me of why the horizon of the HL frames is partially blocked? Can they be easily unblocked?

Someone forgot to remove the tape/thermal blanket when he was up there last week
should be ok tonight...

MFW

Since people are expressing interest, I attach a link to a couple of plots showing the internal temperature of the system over 2 week-long periods, in Nov 04 and Jan 05. (Note that the nov data doesn't have Relative Humidity data; sorry, no way to make this real-time...) The probes were placed on th...

Concam was inside to dry out over the weekend, sorry someone forgot to email. It is back up and appears to be working as of tuesday 1/25.
Hopefully we won't have too many more storms this winter!

I put the camera back up at noon 12/14, with a "blanket" of 3/8" foam insulation to try to prevent the outer aluminum plate from supercooling to the sky. I have a temperature logger inside to monitor the lens, the plate, and the ambient temp & Rh inside the box to get a better ide...

The weather being grim, we took down the camera at ~noon to try to dry it out. I'll leave it in a warm, toasty officce for a couple of days and see if that helps. There was no water/dew inside the enclosure when I openned it up, so the moisture in the lens must be condensation or else its leaking fr...

I examined the camera today & find a spot of water the size of a dime hanging beneath the upper/outer element. It seems like there is an airspace between the first 2 elements that has become saturated, as when I tilted the cover open, the drop slid only slightly but the rest of the area became m...

Some investigation here revealed that the dew is forming inside the lens, beneath the first element - ie it isn't as waterproof as might have been thought. The inside of the box is warm enough that any trapped moisture is sure to migrate to the lens, so some effort to circulate air & warm it ins...

I have used several flexible "heater tape" devices from Minco to stabilize various flat things such as lens mounts. They can also be made to any shape/size/resistance (for a price), and I can imagine an easy layout for a custom "comcam heater" that could be laminated to the alumi...

We have used a couple of small "book" PCs from iDOTpc.com here, the ITX format is nice, and the via motherboards seem pretty good though the fanless version with the crusoe chip is pretty slow. However, they ran redhat out of the box, and happily drive an sbig camera. Their newer "pro...

I have noticed a persistant distorted area in the center of the Haleakala images, which to the untrained eye looks like some water internal to the lens. It has remained nearly the same for some time (week+?) so I don't think it is external dew. I will have a look inside on Wednesday when I plan to b...

We unbolted & rotated the camera this noon, and hopefully it is now oriented correctly. Also put the system on a UPS (but might have crunched a file transfer when it was shutdown - sorry).

- mfw

That wasn't condensation, it was precipitation! Previous images show that at about 1200 UT things got pretty fuzzy - a fogbank came in, leaving things pretty wet for the rest of the evening. Since the Rh was nearly 100%, it took a long time for it to clear out. We have a page of weather, etc info wh...

The HL concam is mounted 180 degrees out - sorry about that.
I will try to get someone to rotate it today if I can, otherwise will do it on monday.

I have no idea what caused the dropout for 7 frames in the middle of the night...

- mfw

We have the Haleakala concam mounted outside, so tonight should get some night sky. However, based on the pictures of the office, I think its going to be rotated 180 degrees from what you expect (N = S) because of how I mounted it. I can rotate or move it if desired... BTW, on the archive page <http...

The elevation of the camera I sent Richard was actually the height above the mean ellipsoid, not true elevation (oops). The correct number is 3048 m above sea level, ~30 meters lower. (what's a few nano-light-years between astronomers?)

-- MFW

The Haleakala camera will be mounted on the green tripod seen in these photos, taken facing more or less east and west respectively (the Big silver coffee can is the Air Force AEOS observatory, located to the NW of the concam.) The lens aperture will be about 6' off the ground when installed, so I d...

I powered it up today, works as expected but not on the summit network yet :) I emailed Robert a couple of detail questions, with those and some mechanical work I hope the camera might be on the sky late next week. For those interested, Haleakala is a Hawaiian place name, actually 4 words (Hale a ka...

It seems to have arrived intact, will move to summit this afternoon, but probably it will take until next week to get the mounting and cabling issues straightened out.
Will update progress as we make some

mfw