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@ Anthony Horton
2025-02-24 03:23:49
Macquarie University's Huntsman Telescope (https://huntsman.space) has been knocked out by ants. Again.
The ants find their way into the electrical power distribution cabinet outside the telescope dome in large numbers, cause short circuits that trip the circuit breakers, and often get inside the breakers too, ruining them.
This happened in January 2018, December 2018, November 2019, December 2019 (took out several telescopes by tripping upstream breakers), February 2020, and now.
After the first few times this happened we looked into whether this was a common problem, and found that anecdotally some species of ants do seem to be attracted to electrical equipment (to the detriment of both the ants and the equipment) but there seemed to be no agreement as to why. Any thoughts on this, nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqzdp33shl69xr0uq3x8n5gsjykq9upycwh6nqm02c3f6x0frrn0dqftargs?
Here are some slides from a conference talk I gave in December 2019, between the 3rd and 4th incident.
#Astrodon #Astronomy #Telescope
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