What a Mess

Okay, so aside from working with youth at my parish, I also work at the local university (where I also am a student). At the University I have two tasks. I teach introductory Astronomy Labs and, recently the Physics chair has asked me to get our 14 in and 16 in telescopes up and running again.

I am not too worried about the 14 in. It still works from the most part, and if all goes well it should be up and running for use in the labs by the end of month. The 16 in however, is a completely different beast. To the left is a picture of the telescope control computer.

I know that a lot of you are computer savvy, and some others of you might not be. In case you can not tell, that is a rodent nest in the computer housing. After three years of not being used for research or teaching, our clever rodent counterparts found a use for it. Needless to say it is a mess. The real concern is there are custom control boards from the telescope in the middle of that nest. I was able to pull them out, but some of the wiring on them was chewed down to the insulation and mouse pee and feces is crusted onto them. The rest of the rack electronics are not in much better shape. The good news was that the dome motors still worked, so all is not lost.

It was really funny. After fighting facilities to get me power in the dome from August until December, I get up there and find this mess. The first time I plugged it in (I was hoping for the best), I smelled something burning... now I know what that smell was. I have spent December and January cleaning up, and I am just now to the point where I can really start to clean the electronics (as an aside if anyone knows of a good electronics cleaning solvent I would love to know its name). It should take me most of February to really clean them, repair them, and hopefully get them working again.

If for some reason I can not get the cables repaired and the PCBs working again we will have to send them back to the vendor for refurbishment. The problem is the original vendor is expensive... well that is the understatement of the year. The best way to describe them is to say that imagine a price that you think is outrageous... now multiply that price by itself, and you have what we will be charged for a repair. That really sucks for a public institution with no funding. 

I guess there are always NSF grants if we really need them, but chances are we will be fine. This is the worst mess I have had to clean up in all of my professional career. Probably the biggest challenge as well. If I can meet it and beat it I my finally be able to prove to a group of people that I did not get here because of who my father was. Finally I may just be able to say to myself definitively that I am at this point in my career because of my skills and abilities... something I have always wondered in the back of my head.

Prayers,

Pisio