Hi,

Sorry for the delay in posting, I can’t remember feeling as busy as I have been over the past few weeks for some time.  The BICEP result took us all by surprise, so we put out a paper on the subject. Then we also finished another paper about inflation.  In the mean time Paul in the old engineering workshop was building me this

which is the metal base I need to connect the telescope to the existing column in the dome.  So we couldn’t decide which precise orientation it had to be and the intructions from Celestron were very vague.  Because of this, he set it up so that we could orient the base plate anyway we need to and then attach the telescope base to it.

This is a picture of Paul

next to his creation.  Paul has been working at King’s College London for 47 years, that’s a long time:-

Anyway, I’ve been crazy busy running around and Paul did all the thinking for me.  Basically the part he has constructed will work WHATEVER orientation we require, what bolts we need to use etc.  So that’s really great.  Here’s another photo which might be clearer:-

So now I have no excuse, I’m going to have to go out there with the vacuum cleaner and clean the thing up.  When I can get the Dome moving again we then stick the telescope in there.  We still only have the telescope, so don’t hold your breath for actual JPEGs from space, not this month anyway…