Sunday evening I managed to corrupt some of the telescope's Lua Scripted functions so everything stopped working. Since I'd done a checkin of the broken code to my svn repository, it seemed that I'd lost most of that day's work -- several hours worth :( Fortunately, I managed to find the typos and fix them in about 30 minutes this morning while doing laundry. *whew*
More functionality has been added to the simulated control pulpit.
1. The Coudé arch and Coudé axis flat are now controllable. The arch is raised and the axis flat is lowered when the telescope is used in the 5-mirror-Coudé configuration. (That doesn't actually happen any more because the Adaptive Optics' laser now occupies the Coudé room.) The design of the axis mirror assembly is loosely based on one of Russell Porter's drawings of the Right Ascension drive. I haven't located any photographs of it.
2. Indicators rotate when the control switches for the telescope's counterweights are turned on. The realtime balance meter is not yet implemented. Hopefully I'll be able to change its balance values depending on which instrument is mounted in the simulation.
3. The pulpit's illumination lamp can be turned on and off. The lamp glows but does not actually cast any light. Maybe some future version of Celestia will make that possible.
4. The pulpit's cover opens and closes. I had to take some artistic license with that. I used the same design for its open/stop/close buttons as are used for the doors of the storage rooms. Both the pulpit cover and those doors are manually controlled in real life, but simulating a pushbutton is a lot easier in Celestia.
5. As with the main control desk, the simulated pulpit has an additional "on/off" button which causes the control switches and dials to be drawn. Celestia runs about 20-30% faster when they're not drawn.
In this picture, the pulpit is on the left, while the right half shows the raised arch and lowered axis flat.
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