The recent passing of Warren Ball, a senior engineer for many years in these organizations saddens the NOAO, NSO, and GONG communities. Warren designed many of the crucial parts of the GONG instrument and shared his incredible wealth of knowledge with the designers and builders of the rest of the GONG system.
I first met Warren when the Mayall 4-m Telescope was undergoing initial testing. There was an oscillation in one of the drives and some way was needed to detect the oscillation so that a correction signal could be fed back into the control system. As a practical engineer interested in simple solutions, Warren used a phonograph stylus and a small stick of wood glued respectively to fixed and vibrating pieces of the mounting to generate the correction signal. When I heard about this elegant solution, it was obvious that Warren was someone who would be good to know. He participated in many instrumentation projects in NOAO and NSO, always finding nice solutions to difficult engineering problems. When the GONG project started, we were lucky to have him as a senior engineer. He is responsible for most of the analog electronic systems in the GONG instrument and developed the logic for the complicated GONG timing system. His most impressive tours-de-force for GONG are the guider and the oven that holds the temperature-sensitive optics. The former uses no moving parts yet is able to negate the effects of clouds at the solar limb and the latter is stable to about 10 microdegrees — no easy feat. But no less important are the multitude of little tricks and techniques that Warren gently suggested to help the designers of other aspects of GONG. I know that I counted on his advice countless times.
Warren's rich store of engineering knowledge was based on a broad background of experience. He served in the military, was a gold miner in Central America, flew his own airplane, and constantly tinkered with things. He possessed an insatiable appetite for learning. His office was famous as a source of strange and wonderful gizmos. Once we were curious if a piece of glass had any radioactivity. He said, "No problem," reached under his desk and pulled out a Geiger counter!
His legacies are many on Kitt Peak, and around the world in the GONG project. And they continue. As I was writing this note, a need for a thin, flexible, heat-transferring membrane came up in the design of one of the instruments for the SOLIS project. I remembered that we had a similar need in GONG and that Warren found just the right material. Problem solved! Perhaps those two words best capture our fond memory of Warren. He is missed, but well remembered.
Jack Harvey