We are continuing the acceptance and development tests on the telescope begun in July. The work planned for the next trip, scheduled for 4-10 December, 2000, had to do with finishing the mechanical work we did not finish in previous months, putting the secondary mirror into the telescope, testing the telescope as a Cassegrain system, and continuing to develop the telescope control system. Since the secondary mirror was still not back from refiguring, we had to defer all the work involving it until the next trip, presumably in January.

The work planned falls into four categories as follows:

1. MECHANICAL ADJUSTMENTS and augmentation of the telescope structure.
1. Cut off the bottom edge of the base skirt to a uniform height and add an access panel in the skirt for getting to the limit switches and oil distribution system. Put the skirt back together and test the telescope. Touch up the paint on the base and skirt. (Eaton cut off the skirt and laid out the access hole during a short visit on 6-7 November and has made the cover plate in Nashville. We made all of the modifications in early December and put the skirt back in the telescope. The skirt still rubs at one or two positions, and we will have to look at that problem again in January.)
2. Put louvers and filters on doors to pump house. Paint the doors to the pump house. (We put the louvers into the doors and painted them in early December.)
3. Finish air sucker and the duct from the pump house. Add covers to back of telescope. Modify motor covers for the base skirt. Add ducts to top of telescope. Seal up holes in the base skirt. (We put the airsucker together and added it to the telescope in early December, planned the runs for the ducts, added the covers to the back of the telescope, and modified the motor covers.)
4. Seal up cracks in the control building. (Sierrita was doing this during the third week in November. We inspected the enclosures and finished the job in early December.)
5. Try to finish the auxiliary oil-return system to make it automatic. (We added a new pump to the axu. oil-return system with a timer to empty the overflow reservoir and tested it.)
6. Get the auxiliary storage building set up before the next (Nov/Dec) work session. Stow extra stuff in auxiliary building. Mark the test tower for reassembly, take it apart, and store it. (Sierrita graded the site for the storage shed on 6-7 November, then set it and put the shipping crates in on 8 November. We finished loading the building in early December and cleaned and straightened the enclosures.)
7. Set up the auxiliary crane for lifting the secondary mirror. (We did this in early December with material sent to the site over the previous couple of months.)
8. Take portrait of the telescope for the web site. (We did this on 7 December)
2. ELECTRICAL WIRING.
1. Finish the wiring harness for the stepper motors and put it into the telescope. (We constructed this harness in Nashville and fitted it in place at the observatory in early December.)
2. Move control computer to the control building. Wire video lines and ethernet cable into the control building, and finish wiring to acquisition/guide camera and to the auxiliary camera. (We moved control of the telescope to the auxiliary building on 4 December, also putting in a video camera to watch the telescope during testing.)
3. Rewire the pump house. (We deferred this task till January since it wasn't necessary for testing the telescope.)
4. Get updated drawings of the electrical system to deposit at the observatory. (Done)
5. Wire atmospheric-pressure sensor into control system. (Williamson did this on 4 December)
6. Route wires from guider/acquisition camera in the instrument head to the control box. (Williamson made up a special cable for this purpose in Nashville and we measured the length required on 9 December.)
3. Work on MIRRORS.
1. Put secondary mirror and instrument head into the telescope. (This is contingent on getting the secondary back from Torus Optics, which we could not do. The task is therefore deferred.)
2. Colimate the Cassegrain system. (Eaton&Williamson: 2-4 hrs-night; Deferred because Torus has not delivered the mirror.)
3. Take images with the full Cassegrain system to assess quality of the complete optical system. (4 hrs-night; Deferred--no mirror.)
4. Take images with the Moon up to see what troubles it may cause. (We took an image of a star within three degrees of the nearly full moon, finding a background of less than 0.1 full scale for a standard 1/30-sec exposure.)
5. Take images to use in developing the guiding strategy. (Deferred: no secondary mirror or guiding head.
4. Work on the DRIVES and CONTROL SYSTEM.
1. Construct a mount model again with only the primary mirror, and verify it by finding stars.(We ran tests of the pointing on five nights, finding slight effects of slipping in the drives that made the pointing change by something of order of 0.3 minutes. On the last night (8 December) we homed the telescope after every five stars plus Polaris, getting pointing over the full night of the order of 0.15 min RMS and defining the basic constants of the mount model accurately. The repeated pointings on Polaris showed slippage less than about 3 arcsec per 6-star group in tilt but some slippage in azimuth of the order of 0.5 arcmin on long slews toward the end of the night. Without the six groups of data showing slipping in azimuth (out of 30 groups total), the positions of Polaris were the same to about 2 arcsec in tilt and 4 arcsec in azimuth)
2. Run acquisition/tracking tests with secondary mirror in place. (Deferred--no mirror.)
3. Construct a mount model with the secondary mirror, and verify it by finding stars.(Deferred--no mirror.)
4. Run mechanical focusing tests with secondary mirror. (We ran most of these in Nashville in November but had to defer others at the observatory until we get the secondary mirror back from Torus Optics.)
5. Run acceptance tests for motions in instrument head. (We ran most of these in Nashville in November.)