Tomorrow's open day. I'm repeating last year's #VR displays with a few minor updates : some labels and text in the Virgo Cluster, and an ALMA antenna floating next to Arecibo's azimuth arm. My plan to do the full ALMA array got scuppered by a combination of a lack of ready availability to the telescope schematics (I could ask someone, but never got around to it) and the urgent need to rebuild my website (still ongoing). So, putting it inside the Arecibo environment saves a lot of setup work and gives a nice way to compare the scales.

My initial idea was to put it at the bottom of the Arecibo dish. But this gets somewhat awkward, needing to re-create materials for the dish which I don't want to muck around with, plus it's difficult for users to reach anyway, needing a lot of teleport meshes to get them down such a large distance. So a high-altitude floating antenna is an odd but serviceable solution which involves the least amount of effort. The annoying thing is that any adjustments to the meshes require 10 minutes to recompile. And this keeps switching my audio output to the headset and insists on playing the background audio that's included, which I can't mute without killing the whole program. It's very annoying.

Anyway, busy busy. The last two days (and evenings !) have been pretty much nothing but preparations. Tomorrow is 10-4/5 for the public, which means ~9-5:30 for the rest of us. Last year that was a continuous, non-stop stream of visitors for the whole session. It's a lot of fun, but it's bloody tiring too. Currently I'm at the stage of having achieved a floating telescope and now having to mess around with all the boring extraneous stuff.

I suspect this is an atypical Friday evening. I'll be glad when it's over.

https://www.asu.cas.cz/articles/2188/19/den-otevrenych-dveri-na-prazskem