Telescope Building

The final changes to the system needed with the change of the building drive were made and the switch over to the new system was completed with the new electronics now permanently mounted in the racks in the electronics room fully replacing the old system.

We have had intermittent problems with the telephone line in the control room and it finally became clear that the problem is the new repeater that was installed at the entrance door. It appears that in some cases the phone is halfway between the repeater and the base station in the basement and switches continuously between them, causing the machine gun noise. Switching off the repeater removes this problem, but than the phone in the dome can not be used as it can not reach the base station. The repeater was moved to the control room such that it always is closer to the phone in the control room then the base station.

One of the goals in the longer term objective of making the operation of the telescope more autonomous and safer is to motorise the side ports (these are currently opened and closed manually). We have started to look at how to achieve this, where the main issue is being able to close the side ports (e.g., in the case of bad weather).