The Second Team Arrived

Teide shadow seen from the Casa Solar
Originally uploaded by Filipe Dias

Sunday, 14th, the second team (Thomas and me) is complete at the MONS observatory, having met the first team there (Lothar and Berthold). After witnessing the shadow of Teide rising over the atmosphere, we headed to the MONS observatory. There we learned how the telescope is controlled, and all sort of introductory stuff. It was a day and night of "handing over" the information from team 1 to team 2. High humidity forced us to close the dome. Meanwhile we changed CCDs, from the observatory camera (parallel SBIG ST-8) to the faster Sigma 1603ME. On the next decent night we will check the perpendicularity of the sensor to the optical path, fine-tune the position of the spectrograph's collimator, and leave the camera and spectrograph ready for acquisition. If everything goes according to plan, we should next attempt to point the spectrograph to WR140.

The evening now is not looking promising.. We are inside the clouds, and naturally, humidity is 100%, as there is no higher value to explain the term "condensed humidity" :)

You can see how the weather is at this instant, on the site of the observatory weather station.