As school gets out in early June, the time to start the maintenance routing begins. This all needs to get done before the Exeter Summer Session, a six week program that runs all of July and into the first two weeks of August. Checklist of To-Do items:

• Wet clean all surfaces of the dome interior including the dome-to-structure interface (pollen and construction debris, spider webs, etc); walls; mount; telescope tube exterior; cables.
• Remove any wasp nests and mud-doubed nest material.
• Sweep out the debris on the floor, wet mop as needed.
• Dry!
• Micro-dust vacuum the optical tube interiors (open tube systems only).
• Clean the optical surfaces.
• Clean the eyepieces. These get really used hard and do not act favorably to eye makeup or DEET. Some get tossed, sadly, each year.
• Replace lubricant on two of the mounts which get annual lube changes. We use Lubriplate 105 for the worm and drive gears on the Paramounts, per Software Bisque’s maintenance plans.
• Replace any optical components that have given-in to New Hampshire weather conditions. Usually the V Photometric filters are first to go, as their glass recipe is reactive to high humidity and sea salt nuclei in the air. Being near sea level does not help.
• Take new darks, biases and flat field frames.
• Clean out any debris in the weather station.

This last year we replaced the rubber matting that seals the dome-to-structure interface, covering the rollers and the opening to the outside world. The original covering was thirty years old! The new material is a smooth surface and not porous like the previous covering. This makes for easier wet cleaning and faster drying.

The results? Clean operational status!