Yesterday saw a whirlwind of activity, morning ’till night. Zacharia was successful in his first installation of Ubuntu and installation of the ExFAT ‘fuse’ driver. You know you have a true geek in the making when you get a high-five following first use of the command line! He then copied ~200GB of data from a shared backup drive and is up and running, with LibreOffice a welcomed replacement for Microsoft’s monopoly on this part of the world.
Thomas, Zacharia and I went to Arusha to purchase a plastic tarp to protect the telescope, magazine boxes for the library, two binders for our myriad NASA photos, user manuals, and info packets; double-sided foam tape to fix the massive 8 x 1.5 meter LROC print of Tycho Crater to the wall (thank you ASU SESE!), and a toolbox for our now substantial workshop. Eliona brought students from his school for a tour of the observatory and then sorted three years of New Scientist magazines into the new filing system–thank you!
We worked into the night, closed up shop after dark only to find the stars had come out. Eliona and Elineema departed (they live further away and must be certain to catch the last matatu) while Zacharia, Pendaeli and I remained. We were able to conduct an extensive test of the Orion 5MB CCD camera (and are quite disappointed) and our first drift test (results to be posted at another time, after confirmation of our findings).
