Cleaning Up

["Thomas Droege" <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

I am slowly cleaning up the systems.  The original Marki IV was designed to
be tilt free.  The design scheme was such that the trombone was loose but
tended to keep the cameras flat.  Once the stiffeners were added they would
enforce any tilt present.  I have been slowly adjusting out the tilt.  It
is just a trial and error process since I have nothing designed in to
adjust the tilt.  I had been using dial calipers but there is no good place
to put them so I made some spacer blocks and am adjusting so there is equal
space on each side.  This works fairly well but it takes a few nights.  I
am making use of the intermittent cloud time to make these adjustments.

I think getting things lined up better and better is not an unusual project
for astronomical telescopes.  One never gets things perfect.  If you try to
you never take any data.  

It was a mistake to buy dual processor machines and use them in the
pipeline.  One of my duals is sick.  So it takes out two - sixths of the
pipeline when it goes.  It is just an intermittent fan, but I have to get
the right fan to fix it.  Sigh!  I have stacks of fans but not one I can
use to replace this one.  I will have to take the whole heat sink assembly
from one of the "hot" spares.  

Better to have six single machines and a spare, I think  I can use the
spare I have set up to do the two pipelines, but I could have spent my
money better buying single machines.  Two single machines end up being
cheaper than one dual machine.  That is the throw away economy.  I think my
next step will be to buy an even bigger monitor switch and run six single
processor machines for the pipeline.  It is nice to have one big machine
though, and that is how I will use the dual processor machines.  One
machine with two processors and lots of memory to work on analyzing the
data.

Tom Droege