First week in Wanaka

Not too much has happened this week. We’re still waiting for some of our card cages (the electronics that read out the detector signals) to get here from Berkeley. They got shipped separately from the rest of the instrument because we wanted to work with them during the month it took the container to get here. Once we get the card cages, we’ll be able to turn on the rest of the detectors, and start putting them on the gondola.

In the meantime, we’ve turned on half of the detectors, and they look good! We’ve also been working a lot on software.

Here are some pictures from this week:

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Here’s a classic photo of McBride with his head in the PDU (power distribution unit). The PDU distributes power from the batteries to all of our electronics.
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We checked out the brewery down the road for lunch one day, but they didn’t have much in the way of food. Some of us enjoyed a beer instead.
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CSBF hooked up some cables for telemetry. There were more than Brent was expecting, so he was confused.
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Carolyn and McBride made a ton of lasagna for lunch last week. Here they are picking the cheese off the unbaked lasagna.
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Brent brought a fancy coffee maker from home. It involves a grinder, but the grinder only works on American power. To use it at our house in New Zealand, we had to bring this huge transformer from the lab.
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Our house came with a cat! We don’t know his/her name, so we call him/her Kitty, Meow, or Fuzzball.
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The cat has started sleeping in my bed at around 5AM every morning.

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