Maintenance

[Thomas Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

It is a never ending battle.

The light box has failed.  Don't ask me how.  Recently the light box flats
have started looking "mottled".  After the flat fielding process the .fits
files look lumpy.  Sigh!  If a light box can fail, then anything can fail. 
I suspect that moisture has gotten into it somehow and changed the
characteristics of the paper to be non uniform.  It looks great.  Back to
sky flats.  Now that we have the additional steps in the pipeline, these
should be OK.  In any case, I don't have anything else.

TOM1 has always has a problem with moisture.  Yesterday I found some of the
tubing had a kink in it and suspected poor flow.  I opened up the tubing
and pressure checked it by blowing in it.  There was a big leak!  Today I
took the hand vacuum pump up and leak checked it.  There was a bad "O" ring
in one of the fittings.  Obviously bad at the factory.  Sigh!  It should
now be much easier to keep the ice crystals off of TOM1 V images.

So it goes.  Last night I got a pretty good run.  Good enough that it is
still computing. 

Tom Droege