Eugene was his name, and he could run the Marathon.
As a side detail he was one of the officers involved in the symmetry project, a theoretical module for second year cadets. I came to know him after my leave. During this period of rest we enjoyed discussing about the fruit of our labour over a hot meal. Finally a hot meal, many days at the front were spent on a measly supply of toasts and tinned food. The tantalising explosiveness of taste which danced with the aroma of roast beef, jacked potatoes and gravy was too good to be true. Malcolm, being a vegetarian, revelled in the delicacies of roast courgettes and sun dried tomatoes. Sun dried, like us, like our skin, slowly tanning, scorching under the blazing sun, which beats us down like a hammer onto an anvil. Not any better when it rains either, a downpour of uncounted needles each stinging, bleaching the skin scorched just hours before.
Through the battle of the elements the telescope grew into shape. Nothing could stop its progress: be it the water infiltrations which always managed to bypass our lines of defence, or the strongest winds which hammered the outer panels and at one point lowered them completely leaving the telescope defenceless against a battering attack from the downpour.
We went back to the dome. I plotted a series of crosses onto its roof after figuring out with my friend Salvish how to bring the hatch down. Salvish was a member of the TR division, the Theoretical Recruits; he was shocked by what he saw. "Crazy is an understatement for the struggle you are undertaking". A great partnership was to blossom that day, as we decided to undertake project Mitori, but that is another story.
I drew the blueprints for the handle which we were going to fix onto the panel. This was done by placing a rigid piece of wood below the panel and tracing its outline with a pencil. The result was a line depicting the curvature of the panel.
The level of progress walked side by side with the level of complexity. New problems required new solutions, but these would nearly always create other problems to be tackled. The fitting of the timing belt onto the metal ring was as dangerous a task as any. The noxious fumes emanating from the can of super adhesive glue made the telescope seem a much smaller place, colourful, gleaming with rainbow like flashing colours and inhabited by picturesque animated puppets. I had to escape; the opened hatch would not allow the fresh air in as much as I would have hoped for, agonisingly, with my head in a whirlpool I random-walked, pinballing myself around the dome to find the door, opened it and took a gasp of normality, before plunging back into that misty world of fervid imagination and exaggeration.
The timing belt had to be stuck all in one go; the full ten metre long belt was glued on metre by metre by first spreading the mucky glue onto the belt and then onto the ring, wait a couple of minutes and then press hard, before applying pegs. The result was a sticky green paste all over my hands and fingers, it resembled a downgraded version of a man eating Flubber, eroding away under the nails, into the pores, and between the fingers. After hours spent counting green smurfs with red bonnets jumping on and off of yellow mushrooms I gazed in awe at how the glue performed its wizardry. Ten metres of timing belt secured perfectly all within 1 mm of the border of the iron ring. A good day's job, and fresh air deserved as I spent the remainder of the day recovering in a starfish position gazing at the white clouds overhead.
The failure was all mine. The shame and anger of my superiors took its toll on my morale as the handle project remained just a project. An idea which had been weeks in the making, discarded by frustration. The curvature of the boomerang handle did not fit the curvature of the panel. This was due to the fact that the trace I performed the day before was of the bottom part of the panel, whereas the handle had to be placed in its centre. The panel became less and less curved towards its bottom, hence a perfect bottom fit meant a rubbish middle fit. The fiasco had a huge impact on the ratchet mechanism which was supposed to pull both panels upwards; namely, it just did not happen. Climbing onto the roof, I used what was left of my sailing skills to tie the panels together and allow them to slide over each other when ascending and allow the top panel to be pulled down by the inner one when the latter was pulled down.
The urgency of such an operation was made crystal clear after the Horribilis day in which both panels were savagely battered down by wind and rain and the telescope was left drenched in water by what was described as London's wettest and harshest weekend to date. Everything seemed to want to fight us. A temporary solution was found for the hatch, but the ideas we had will be used in the future; if the ultimate goal was to automatize the dome then the ratchet was the way to go.
The Arduino board was the next step in the stairway to completion. The Arduino is, i am proud to say, a 100% Italian invention. It is the relay between the PC and the machine, like the missing step between the brain and an action. Coding is relatively easy in an Arduino, the database of available resources is very broad. The ultimate goal was to have a code which would allow the dome to rotate according to where the telescope finally settled to look at a star. Many ideas were mustered, including using a digital compass, or a circular capacitor which would register a different voltage according to the rotation for the dome with respect to the telescope.
But all these ideas were based on making the dome understand where it was and act accordingly to free up the viewing space for the telescope. What we did in the end was secure two infrared distance detectors on either side of the telescope tube, these would send signals at high frequencies which would bounce onto the dome, if the telescope was pointing towards it, and hence give the dome the order to rotate. When both detectors did not detect an obstacle, this meant that the telescope was aligned in front of the hatch, the dome would not rotate further. How to make the dome understand which direction to rotate in order to minimise the distance it travelled was still to be tackled.
Ultimately we had a system in which a user would input the name of a star they wanted to see into the hand held device, the telescope would translate this as a set of coordinates by looking up the star's reference in its database and orientate the telescope accordingly. The telescope would then tell the dome, via the detectors to either rotate or not to free up the view. We knew how to do this, we had built a fuse box, placed two relay switches which would translate the on/off signals of the Arduino into an on/off signal for the motors.
All this would have been impossible to achieve hadn't we given the telescope a reality check. That's right, we had to let it know where it was, and figure out in which direction it was facing. One might think that this is an easy task, however it did take me a whole day to do just that. To have the coordinates of the telescope one simply looks at google maps, finds the former and places their cursor ontop of it. The coordinates automatically appear in the form of a latitude and a longitude. However, knowing where the telescope will be facing is very tricky. This is mainly because of the metal ring in the dome; as it is made of metal, using a compass will not work as the Earth's magnetic field is perturbed. Hence, I had to decide which landmarks were visible from the dome, look them up in google maps, find their latitude and longitude coordinates and then perform trigonometry to calculate their bearing from the North. Once happy with the bearing, I rotated the dome such that the hatch faced the landmark. I drew a line with chalk and plotted the bearing and cross referenced it with other landmarks just to make sure. It turns out that East from the telescope is smack bang pointing at the tip of Blackfriars bridge.
The telescope knew where it was, it towered like a colossus satisfied in having understood where it stood in life. A pretty positive day.
