Since we stopped observation on August 22nd we've been reversing our work of the past year, taking pieces off the telescope and putting our gear back into boxes. It turns to be easier to take things apart than to put them together: in under two weeks we've gone from a fully operating instrument to a bare telescope with only mirrors and servos still attached. While Dave and I have been crawling all over the telescope, Ian and Tom have been going through the storage container, packing boxes and making sense of all the junk we've accumulated. Bryan was trying to work on data analysis so we made him drain the water and antifreeze from the chiller into jugs. Today we took apart the gantry, which was the last structure we're going to take apart ourselves.
To remove the various panels we had the telescope in birdbath position for a few days, and an overnight rain left this tree stump pattern on the primary. The Vertex guys are showing up in a little more than a week to handle the dis-assembly of the major pieces with the big crane as well as final preparations for shipping. We're in good shape for their arrival so we're taking a few days off this weekend.
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