Starship Asterisk*

The South Africa (SA) CONCAM3 that supports the SALT telescope site in Sutherland, South Africa, has been off-line since 2004 May 28. There was a computer failure that might have been caused by heat. There was also a (different?) computer problem related to the hardware clock on the computer, which appeared not to work. Even with these problems the SA CONCAM can be brought up, we feel. However, there now appears to be a firewall problem inhibiting a secure connection.

We have a new computer that are willing to send to SA to replace their computer (which we would then fix), but we are reluctant to send it until a "sunset" switch is installed. The sunset switch would turn off the electronics during the hot daytime, so that we would not endanger another computer.

- RJN

CONCAM users may be interested to know about the availability of weather forecasts for the SAAO site in Sutherland which are now being made in operational mode. These forecasts have been developed for SALT. For more information please go to:
http://www.saao.ac.za/~saltmet/
where you will find the links to the forecast products.

Do we have any estimated time yet for when the SA CONCAM will be functioning again?

The South Africa CONCAM seems to have resumed operation on 8/26/2004 at 20:42.

Vic Muzzin wrote:The South Africa CONCAM seems to have resumed operation on 8/26/2004 at 20:42.

Right. But it is still not in a steady state. It will take a while until the sunset switch is installed. The sunset switch is the only effective protection against the extreme heat of the desert.

SA COncam has been in operation for at least week without fail after the sunset switch has been installed. We also improved the shielding against the hot sun of the karoo desert . We have used a 3mm aliminium plate to cover the box in the direction of the SUN. But this seems to baffle lens from seeing more sky because of the aliminum shielding on the way ( Image seems smaller than previous images). The technicians will rectify this in future by lowering the aliminum cover to be at the same height as the lens.

I didn't realize that the sunset switch is already installed. That is excellent.

Update: The SA team reports that the computer has failed. We have two replacement computers here at MTU but both have bad power supplies. The power supplies were ordered a while ago and should have come in by now. But they have not.

I have been calling CyberRearch every day trying to get the sales manager to call me back. I spoke with him two weeks ago and he said that he is checking on it and that he expects to send us two free power supplies in the next few days. But they are not here, and now he won't return my calls. When we speak he sounds so up-front and earnest!

The latest is that he is out of the office and due back tomorrow, 2004 Sep 28. I will keep trying him. By Wednesday if I have still had no success we may have to go a different route to get a working computer to send to SA. We here at NSL central apologize for the delay.

- RJN

The SA Concam has been returning "fuzzy" images for some time now, we have contacted SA personnel and await a response regarding what may be the trouble.

I just checked the SA Concam and it has a weird noisey image from 2004/9/15 displayed now, and some rise set times from 2004 as well at the bottom of the page.

They may be working on it and the image may be fixed by the time you read this but I thought I would post the info anyway.

SA Concam is still down. Last image was taken on March 1, 2005, currently displaying the image from 2004.

The SA Concam has had its lens repaired and will return to operation soon (tonight perhaps).

Hi,

The CONCAM at Sutherland took its last picture on 19/03/06. Does anybody know its current state, and if there is an expected return to operation date?

I was hoping to use the images to callibrate a cloud detector.

Thanks,

Dave