The LFC Team, & SALTICAM, are Back!

Busy day up at SALT yesterday!  The laser frequency comb team (Richard & Shan from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, + Malcolm & Lisa from Cape Town) are back at the telescope for Phase II of the comb integration effort.

Wimpie & Etienne (E10) have been busy completing the electronics boxes for the comb that were being built up here.

With the necessary mods done to the comb housing that was made by the workshop at SAAO in Cape Town, we could check that the liquid cooling circuit doesn't leak before putting all the optics back in & then getting the cabling for the piezo's sorted out.

Meanwhile the Tech Ops team was getting the telescope ready for re-installing SALTICAM, which has been offline for the past 10 weeks.  The mechanicals got the big tracker access platform installed & then removed the drawbridge part of the normal access platform.

Having installed & charged all the new cryo-cooler pipes, checked the vacuum & tested all the SALTICAM mechanisms, it was time to remove the backup camera (BCAM) from the payload.  Here it is back where we like it - down on the ground, in the HRS electronics room!

With BCAM out of the way we could see that the SALTICAM fold mirror, & one of the mirrors in the slit-view Offner relay, badly needed a clean! 

Fortunately it wasn't anything too nasty so it cleaned up quickly.  The view below shows the pupil mask & moving baffle on the top of the atmospheric dispersion compensator (ADC), as seem in the SALTICAM fold mirror.

With the SALTICAM fold looking like a mirror again & the cleaner out the way, the SALTICAM bay in the payload was ready for the return of our long-lost acquisition camera.

Space is always at a premium up there but Eben, Thabelo, Nico, Nicolaas & Johan all managed to get where they needed to be.

The daunting process of lifting the roughly 50 kg beast up & into the bay was made to look relatively easy...  But it's still not something we'd choose to do for fun!

Everything was connected up & we held our breath as the cooling started.  Happily the system cooled quickly & without issue, so SALTICAM was ready for action by the start of the observing night.

Though SALTICAM is getting long in the tooth & it's far from ideal, the observers were Very happy to have it back at last, with its much larger field of view & better sensitivity making acquisitions far easier.