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NSO/KP Operational and Instrumentation Activities (1Jun93) (from NSO, NOAO Newsletter No. 34, 1 June 1993) Work continues on the replacement of the aging motor generators at the McMath-Pierce and KP Vacuum Telescopes with Rotary Uninterruptable Power Supplies (RUPS) systems. Two 25 KVA RUPS were ordered last fall. The new system is designed to run both facilities from one RUPS if the other is down due to failure or preventive maintenance. Work will be completed by the end of this summer. The DEC PDP 11/44 and CAMAC were retired at the FTS (see article by J. Brault et al. for details) and replaced by a Heurikon and Sun SPARC workstation. The PDP 11/73 that ran the CCD controller was retired when ICE was installed. The 11/73 is now available as a spare system for the TCP/Photometry system. The new infrared/visible gratings system has been installed and tested in the main spectrograph (see article by Pierce and Livingston). Work was recently begun in the NOAO shops on the fabrication of the mechanical components of the 10830 AŹ Filtergraph. The fabrication effort will becompleted this summer. Some time ago backlash and pointing problems with the east and west auxiliary telescopes were traced to wear of the bull gears in the telescope-drive systems. New gears were ordered last fall and have recently arrived. Installation is planned for this summer's telescope shutdown. Great improvement in the functioning of the auxiliary telescopes is anticipated. A large turbo pump, purchased by JPL, was recently installed on the 6-meter-path White cell at the solar FTS. It is anticipated that the new vacuum system will greatly assist in the removal of contaminants in the laboratory multi-pass absorption cell. Optical design work is underway on the cross dispersion of the echelle grating in the stellar spectrograph. The intensified CCD replacement for the aging ISIT camera used for guiding at the stellar spectrograph will arrive by the end of this summer. The new system is being developed and built by the KPNO OUV group. Jeremy Wagner
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