August was an important month here in Cincinnati. On the weekend of Aug 3-5 I visited Tom and acquired MIKE. Tom was able to familiarize me with MIKE and the current software on Friday night which was mostly clear. On Saturday we tore MIKE down and loaded up my minivan with all the parts and accessories. Sunday my wife and I drove back to Cincinnati and unloaded all the parts.
During the next week or so I was able to reassemble MIKE in my basement and communicated successfully with it. All the motors worked properly after some of the connectors were rearranged and MIKE seems to be fine. I wasn't able to see any stars from the basement ;) but I did create darks, etc. that seemed reasonable with the expected range of values.
Now that I had MIKE assembled I was able to take enough measurements to create a design for an enclosure. What I came up with was a 4 foot wide, 4 foot deep, and 6 foot tall enclosure with a split sliding roof. (This is where a picture is worth a thousand words. The pictures will go up on the site as soon as possible!) MIKE will sit on a platform at the 3 foot level and the controlling computer will sit at the 1 1/2 foot level. The roof is in two parts which open in the middle and slide 20 inches in either direction. This should allow either camera to see any point in the sky within 45 degrees of the meridian and at my latitude from about -20 degrees to +90 degrees in declination. (Actually there is a tree that limits it a little more but the enclosure won't interfere.) That should give me enough to look at for a while!
The enclosure is now complete except for some trim work and staining and I hope to move MIKE out into the enclosure this week. I will let everyone know when that happens and when I get some pictures to the web site. My goal for September is to have MIKE operational in time for the transits of HD209458 that start on Sept 22.