Newly Re-EmPowered

We lost power at the summit of Haleakala today. Looks like planned electrical work, as it was from roughly 9am to 5pm Hawaiian time. I know MECO/Hawaiian Electric has some infrastructure upgrades to do, so this is a Good Thing if it means we avoid more multi-week outages in the future when big storms hit.

Our UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply–a fancy battery) kept us running for almost two hours before giving out. That’s slightly under the predicted runtime, but still solid performance I’m happy to see.

Unfortunately, the network upstream from us isn’t battery backed, so there’s nothing we can do remotely when these happen. We just have to let the software execute the automatic failsafe, then check that everything is ok when it comes back online.

In a weather update, this winter has been the worst for observing since we started. Normally winter is one of our best times: a lot of long dark nights with low humidity. This winter has not been that, at either observatory. We did start getting some good–and even simultaneously good–nights in the past couple weeks. Fingers crossed for more clear skies!