Saturday: Further progress on obs. during endless cloudbursts.

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Saturday: First "live" lifting of the trapdoor from below. While simultaneously climbing the stepladder and carrying the heavy laptop case in one hand. I pushed the trapdoor upwards and it continued to the vertical parking position without the least effort. It is perfectly balanced and has very low friction. Excellent!

This means I can stop being lazy and lock the trapdoor down from below as I leave the building. Before the counterweight mod, it was just far too much work to lift the trapdoor from below. So I simply avoided doing so. Despite the ease with which I could have doubled up on physical security.

Now I need to rearrange the AWR electronics boxes, assorted power supplies and mains multi-sockets. They were mounted on brackets, low on the eastern side of the pier but now the steel, drawer cabinet needs that space. I'm thinking of mounting the closed laptop in brackets to lie flush with the pier. There are at least five cables plugged into it. So all that needs to be streamlined for quick connection and removal at the start and end of an imaging or observing session.

I re-checked the internet speed with the laptop resting on the eastern desk extension and was shocked to see 100Mbps up and down. With the laptop on the northern side of the pier the wireless connection from the house router was highly variable and often very poor indeed. Probably interference from the massive mounting and the three, big, all metal OTAs spread across a wide arc. Another unexpected, but very positive result from desk reorganization! I never wanted to sit on the east side of the pier so never checked the laptop wireless just there.

If only the desk would fix the weather! Thunder is rumbling overhead and the rain is absolutely deafening on the dome! Eek! Far too late to dash across the yard to the house now! And, so it went on for hours. I would return to the dome during lulls only for it to start lashing down again and thundering.

The dome is leakier than I thought under these extreme circumstances. I'm going to have to make up a long narrow "roof" to protect the screen from any falling drops. It can be combined with shading arrangements from the overhead light for all my solar moments. Though the AOC screen is amazingly matt. So reflections aren't the same problems as the laptop always was.

I'll really have to look at the shutters too. I can see a band of daylight up high which is letting wind driven droplets in. Normally any leakage is only visible as a local wetting of the base ring. Which I really don't worry about. The difference is in the sheer volume of falling rain today and the strong winds. Even at  normal strength the trees are thrashing about. The gusts are probably double that.

The shutters should be closed more tightly together up high but that would need a stepladder. Which I really don't want to house permanently in the dome. I could make up a pair of long tongs to press the shutters together overhead. The tongs would take up no space at all compared with a ladder. Perhaps a simple alloy pole would do it? I'll have to give that a try. No, that didn't work but the shutters had already snuggled together in the windy conditions. Opposing pulleys and ropes could pull the shutters together at the zenith. Provided the ropes weren't too long they needn't get in the way. 

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