Starship Asterisk*

The Haleakula (HL) CONCAM3 is nearly complete. I spoke to our machinist Dave Cook yesterday and he said that everything is in place but that the waterproof caulk had to set. After than, the CONCAM3 will be tested in our lab for a few days. I expect that the HL CONCAM will ship the week of August 10.

The U. Hawaii group is eager to get this CONCAM3 to help them evaluate the atmospheric quality and brightness of their Haleakula site in comparison with the Mauna Kea site. Such a comparison might impact where major telescopes are placed in the future.

Our own group is particularly excited about the HL CONCAM since it will be the first time two CONCAM3s (including the Mauna Kea MK unit) are close enough to give useful parallax observations for meteors and clouds. Also, the similar fields of view will allow for more reliable combined transient detections.

- RJN

The transient detection between the twin cameras will be particularly interesting... It will also be useful to compare the data between the two camera when doing photometry for variable stars.

The FedEx tracker indicates that this CONCAM3 arrived at Kula, Hawaii at 3:06 pm, August 13 and was signed for by K. Rhoden.

- RJN

\o/

Can't wait until it's up and running.

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

The HL group reported by email that the HL computer has a power supply problem. Now we have another computer here but it hadn't been tested or had linux loaded. So Dave Torrey (TJ) just tried to load linux and failed -- likely (again) due to a bad power supply.

Oy.

So I just called CyberResearch, the people who make the Industrial PCs that we use. I soon spoke with the sales manager "Robert" who told me that the power supplies are built in, but he will check on it. He was initially skeptical the power supplies were at fault but I read him the two emails and he soon agreed that they were likely the problem. He expressed surprise as they test all machines with a burn-in period before sending them out.

I reminded him that our NSL project has ANOTHER Industrial PC on order since mid-June that has yet to arrive. He verified this and said that he doesn't understand what is going on and promised to get to the bottom of this ASAP and call me back. He indeed sounded sincere, which I guess that is better than sounding apathetic.

CyberResearch now knows that we need a working IPC as soon as possible and appears willing to work with us to get there. More as it happens. We at NSL apologize to the HL team for the delay.

- RJN

Maybe it's too late to change the name of this forum, but the mountain on Maui is Haleakala (house of the sun). Beats me how you translate Haleakula...

(I'll be hiking up there in about two weeks. )

Thanks, David. Fixed it. - RJN

The computer company, CyberResearch, rushed us a new computer. We received it, loaded it with linux and our control software, and sent it off to HL by FedEx today. It should arrive in Hawaii sometime tomorrow (Thursday, 2004 August 26).

- RJN

The FedEx tracker indicates that the new CONCAM computer arrived in Kula, Hawaii at 3:10 pm local time and was signed for by "A.HASEGAWA".

- RJN

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 La, with diacritical marks I can't insrert here) which translates as House of the Sun, a good place for a solar observatory!. It is a reference to the creation myth/legend concerning the demigod Maui, who caught the speeding sun with his fishing net from the summit to slow it so his mother's tapa cloth would dry. The full telling of the story is much more entertaining...

-MFW

Mark Waterson emailed me the following orientation information for the HL CONCAM3. I record it here in case this information would be useful to anyone. I myself used it to generate the Rise and Set time data table for HL:

The most recent survey data we have (actually for Lure, which is about 20meters East of the concam location) is: 20.70720 degrees N lat, 156.2559 W Long, 3062.658m elevation AMSL.

I'll get the unit up the mtn and on the net as soon as I can.

- RJN

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 don't think there will be any large obstructions on the horizon although we probably will see the thin whip antenna to the South and the black National Weather Service anamometer/wind vane to the SW (sorry about that...)
As soon as I can get the ethernet wiring fixed we'll mount the camera outside, probably next week. Meanwhile it will see the ceiling of my office if you turn it on
[...these are big...]

+++++++++++

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

Finally its up, the HL concam. Congratulations !
Look forward to seeing the sky through HL

Not so fast Tilvi. The station seems to be indoors and does not have a clear view of the sky. Besides, many of the featured are not yet enabled. I will enable them as soon as we get good pictures.

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://nightskylive.net/hl/hl040907.html> the location says Mauna Kea, not Haleakala.

- mfw

Mwaterson wrote: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://nightskylive.net/hl/hl040907.html> the location says Mauna Kea, not Haleakala.

- mfw

Congratulations !
its up running.

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

The strange frames are caused by our software during the switch-over from 180 second integrations during no-Moon, to 20 second integrations when the Moon is above the horizon. What happens is that the old 180-second dark frame is being used during the first few 20-second integrations. A new dark frame is taken every 8 frames. This happens to all of the CONCAMs and we are not proud of it, but it does not indicate any problem with the CONCAM.

These frames will not go away (in similar situations) until we update how we deal with dark frames in our software. We have been discussing this for some time now but haven't changed the basic software in nearly a year. But we will surely sometime in the next year.

I am sorry but I hope this explains it.

- RJN

The new CONCAM is collecting some beautiful images, congratulations!

It seems that we have some moisture problems:

http://nightskylive.net/hl/hl040912/hl0 ... 35550p.jpg

Nothing unexpected about that. Some stations like Siding Spring and Canary Islands use domes to protect the stations from getting wet.

Most of the time the water drops shown on the lens just evaporate, if not during the same night then in the Sun during the next day. If water on or in the lens remains a problem for HL, then I would recommend first heating the lens. This should reduce the time that it takes for water spots to evaporate and even prevent dewing. If moisture is still a problem even after heating the lens, then I would recommend a dome. Beware the domes can act like "cold fingers" and show even more moisture and dewing than the lens!

Note that the Mauna Kea (MK) CONCAM does not have -- and has never had -- a dome.

- RJN

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 which might be interesting at http://banana.ifa.hawaii.edu/ (Please note that some of the links there are local-only due to program restrictions.)
In particular the 24 hr plot at http://banana.ifa.hawaii.edu/metplot.html is a good indicator of how things are up there - This <http://koa.ifa.hawaii.edu/~waterson/metpluh2004256.gif> shows the humidity pulse a night ago.

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