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The Grinnell College Service Call
On June 13, 2001, the DFM maintenance team visited
the Grant Gale Observatory at Grinnell College in Grinnell,
Iowa to clean and adjust their DFM 24-inch telescope.
The telescope at Grinnell College was originally installed
in November 1982.
In addition to the telescope, Grinnell has a DFM Guide
Acquire Module (GAM), DFM Spectrograph, DFM dewar and
Reticon Detector all controlled by a DFM eight axis
controller.
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Grant
Gale Observatory
Mr. Ian Huss, our production manager,
made the service call.
First, Ian cleaned the whole telescope.
He then cleaned and lubricated the telescope's friction
drives and inspected the drive cover seals for wear
and damage.
Dr. Robert Cadmus, Observatory Director
and Ian checked the optical collimation and refined
the telescope control system's pointing model, which
provided data to prove the telescope still points to
14 arc seconds RMS.
He
has always taken the lead, upgrading his original control
system first to the Macintosh PC and subsequently to
the X-86 PC which is now DFM's standard system.
Dr.
Cadmus is very active in his research, demanding
that the telescope perform as advertised.
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In 18 years,
there have been very few failures at Grinnell, and Dr.
Cadmus has been very pleased with the performance of
his DFM telescope, control system and instrumentation.
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