So on Friday we decided to stop messing around and actually get the telescope in the dome. First we had to carry the boxes from my office onto the roof which involved a lot of grunting and sweating and swearing.

Then we attached the “electronics pier” to the central column using the adapter that was built for us by Paul in the engineering workshop.  It doesn’t look like a pier but I’m used to piers that don’t look like piers as I come from Wigan

Then we lifted the mount onto the “pier”.  It was very very heavy.

At this stage we were becoming slightly euphoric because we hadn’t broken anything yet and it seemed to be going OK.

Then we managed to get the telescope on top, which was also very heavy and very scary because you don’t want to drop it.

And there we are.  We’ve not got it wired up yet but we have established that it works (yes we have looked at the shard and no, we didn’t see anything interesting).  Without the motor wired up it’s almost impossible to look at particular things, we just managed to establish that it actually works and makes things that are far away look big, which it does, which is good.

The very nice and professional people at the KCL PR department are looking for positive stories at the moment so they made a nice video of the process, which you can look at here:-