DDOTI In Service Again
05 May 2022
DDOTI is in service again, albeit with three only telescopes, C1, C2, and C3.
Telescope C0 was accidentally damaged in April when the new focuser electronic cards were installed.
Alan Watson and Carlos Tejada reconfigured DDOTI to mitigate this damage. They removed this telescope, and we are sending it to the manufacturer for repairs. They also had to remove telescope C5 in order to balance the mount.
After removing the two telescopes, they changed the relative pointing of C1 with the aim that it would observe the position on the sky previously observed by C5 and give compact 2 × 2 field like this:
However, the result was that the overlap between C1 and C3 is currently about half a field. We will install shims to reduce the overlap in June 2022.
Furthermore, the new focuser electronic cards have a weak USB connector which broke on several of the cards. They had only three working cards, and so C4 is temporarily out of service. We expect to install new cards, with the connector reinforced with epoxy, in the first week of June 2022.
At the moment, then, the fields are oriented like this:
The detectors are currently not well aligned with the focal planes of the telescope, so there are focus gradients across the fields. We will align the detectors in the first week of June 2022.