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. |
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. |
