On the summit!

I went up to the summit Tuesday night for two days to do some instrument fixing. The drive up was really nice. Wednesday was interesting - I got some good hardware things done but the power died. I guess a very large portion of the island was toast and the summit went with it. We were on generator power when John came up. We did a lot of testing and found a pretty nasty hardware issue - the tip-tilt mirror wouldn't tilt (piezo died on one axis). That means we couldn't finish our hardware testing or trouble-shoot Johns new software on the sky. I was slated to go observing Thursday night but the mount had some issues from the power failure. Add that to the new CCD not focusing and it amounts to a pretty depressing first week of hardware. The tip-tilt won't tilt, the new camera won't focus, the mount is dead for a day. So.... I spent a bunch of time working on my talks. The nice thing was, I was down at low elevation, sleeping normal hours in a normal atmosphere and getting to hang out with Judy a bunch. It's like I live on Maui or something....