As predicted by the forecast below, RFO is socked in tonight. Tomorrow night should be really good, however.
Astronomer’s forecast, credit A. Rahill
The first three rows mostly characterize moisture in the air (a lot tonight, very little tomorrow night). Seeing represents turbulence, but that doesn’t affect us much because our pixels are big, which is because our field of view (FOV) is enormous (75 degrees!). Darkness matters a lot however for the same FOV reason. And this week, the Moon rises and sets with the Sun, which makes the nights nice and dark because the Moon isn’t lighting up every tiny water droplet and mote of dust that happens to be floating around the sky.
And so this is what the sky currently looks like at Ferguson:
Live view screen capture from RFO1
However, at the same time, looking at the exact same stars–but from underneath a different part of the atmosphere–IFA2 is having a great night:
Live view screen capture from IFA2
Hopefully, tomorrow night it’ll stay this way in Hawaii but also look like this in California!
It’s been a while since we’ve had good conditions up on Haleakala. Rain, fog, high clouds… you name it. Day after day, it seemed it wouldn’t stop. Nice to see the stars again, so pretty and clear!
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In every LaserSETI instrument, there’s a large-capacity USB hard drive that we use to capture all the data coming from the two science cameras. Even with the biggest drives being made today, we can only store a month or two worth of data, but it’s an important staging area. The one in IFA2, however, had been dropping offline whenever we tried to read or write too much data to it.
So we shipped out a new drive to Doug, who’s local on Maui, and yesterday he drove the 3-hour round trip to the summit and replaced the drive. The weather had been uncooperative and we prefer not to operate in the rain, but he saw an opening and made a dash for it.
New hard drive in IFA2, underneath the science computer, which is below the “vert-cam” science camera
I don’t want to say “it’s fixed” too early or jinx it, but last night we made it through a full night of observing, streaming data at over 100 Mbps, while also backhauling the data to our datacenter in California… stressing the hard drive to the max, and everything went smoothly! Fingers crossed it stays happy for a good long while.
Astrophysical masers are a well known phenomenon when molecules within a stellar atmosphere get excited and emit coherent photons. When it happens around an (active) galactic nucleus, it’s proportionately brighter hence the aptly-named megamaser.
To be clear, astrophysical masers are different than what LaserSETI is looking for in a number of ways. First, these are radio waves, not visible light. Second, they shine equally in all directions (isotropic) vs. human-made lasers which are a focused beam (spatially coherent). Third, they don’t turn on and off like a light switch.
Turns out I did save a “before” movie of the RFO1 sunshade that wasn’t opening fully! It had been working great for a long time, but the real world is messy like that apparently. Clearly it was the humidity, cold temperatures, phase of the moon, and local unicorn population that was causing the friction.
RFO1 sunshade before fancy lubricant
Speaking of locals, Dan, did a phenomenal job this weekend and got the main computer within RFO2 back online! It’s been a long string of wacky issues, from the exact DC voltage it was receiving, to the firewall, to the unusual Vadj potentiometer on our DC transformer. The science cameras are still offline, but that’s probably a minor issue and we’ll hope to be observing again this week.
In related news, the hard drive on IFA2 has been flaky, so we’re also hoping to get that replaced on a similar timeline.
Yesterday, Dan and I spent all day at Ferguson Observatory (RFO). We had a spot of rain to work around, but a number of things to get done and the trip was largely successful.
RFO1 (foreground) and RFO2 (covered) pose in front of RFO’s 8″ refractor dome
We dropped off the Drobo “SneakerNet” disk array that we use to exfiltrate data from RFO because the satellite link is too slow and expensive for that. LaserSETI analyzes data in real-time, but since we’re still in the early phases of our dual observation strategy, we’ve kept pretty much every pixel of observed photons thus far. This time was special because we had a failed disk (it’s a 5-disk array), but even after replacing that disk with two different spares, we concluded that one of the ports in the Drobo itself has failed.
We soldered the vert-cam’s power lead after having previously bypassed the relay in precariously fragile but 100% reliable manner *cough*cough*zip*tie*cough*.
Eliot takes a moment to appreciate Sonoma County’s beauty while working on RFO1
If you’ve been watching the live pictures from the instruments recently, you would’ve seen evidence of RFO1’s sunshade not opening fully. I think it might be related to the humidity but, in any case, we carefully applied our special Teflon lubricant meant for polycarbonate, allowing it to out-gas as much as possible before reinstalling it, to prevent any potential chemical reactions on the optical surfaces. It’s now performing flawlessly! I wish I’d remembered to save a before-and-after movie since it records a movie of every open or close, but it currently overwrites the previous one. It’s on our To Do list to save a sample, for the curious as well as to document the daily operation of this critical component.
Snapshot of live view from RFO1 on March 20th
Since it was wet, it was a good chance to observe the seals, louvers, and other ingress protection mechanisms in action. I’m pleased to report that not a drop of water could be found inside the instrument!
Clean and dry “bill of health” for the enclosures
On RFO2, the problem had been with its external hard drive, mostly working whenever tested but failing fairly quickly under the heavy load of science observing. Having replaced the drive, enclosure, and cord, we replaced the PC itself. Long story short, Dan did a huge amount of work, figuring out that adding an internal drive didn’t work while on 12 volt DC power (but did work on 13 volt DC), that modern browsers refuse to speak the old version of SSL that our router uses, and that Windows Firewall is unreasonably insistent in blocking remote access. All of these issues took an inordinate amount of time to diagnose, particularly because they all happened simultaneously and hence had to peel the layers of failure and obstacle like an evil onion. Now that we’re pretty sure we have a complete diagnosis, we expect to have RFO2 back online within a week or so, since it will require a another trip–the 5th actually–on this issue.
RFO2 in the middle of one of its (many) removals of its PC science computer
Jumping to Hawaii for a minute, after a surprising but successful visit last month to Haleakala, IFA1 has performed well and taken a lot of great data. Unfortunately, IFA2 has started exhibiting similar external hard drive issues to RFO2, so we’re making arrangements to try swapping out the disk and enclosure, as well as create some software backup procedures to allow some observing when this symptom appears, based on our learnings from trying to do so with RFO2.
For those of you who followed the Mars Exploration Rovers, I think you’ll understand why I feel like both RFO1 and IFA1 are like Opportunity, and RFO2 and IFA2 are like Spirit. After operating on Mars for more than a year, the NASA team noted that everything came easily to Opportunity, while Spirit had difficulty after difficulty. It’s especially eerie that Opportunity landed first, and the LaserSETI analogs are RFO1 and IFA1.
