The individual lenses arrived for Murison's compound lens (called the "M-lens") for the dFTS back end. Unfortunately, one of the lenses was incorrect in focal length, so another (correct) lens was quickly purchased, though uncoated due to the short time available before the next observing run. The M-lens was underperforming during lab tests until it was discovered that one of the lens spacings was mis-fabricated. (It's not clear how that might have happened.) Fortunately, the design tolerances on placement errors along the optical axis are loose, so it was a simple matter of fixing the problem by inserting spacers on one of the adjustable distances to bring the lens back to good focus.

Murison's technical memo on the calibration of the dFTS guider box adaptive optics mirror was torpedoed due to politics.

Murison and Behr finished work on the new dFTS guider box. Lab testing confirms that the new design appears to work as anticipated, though we won't really know for sure until it is tested at the telescope.

Murison upgraded the guider box control software, in preparation for the Kitt Peak observing run. Sections of the code dealing with combined images of the starlight directly and the fiber (telescope focus) plane indirectly were made more robust, and the interface was changed considerably in order to make it easier to use for other observers.

Murison continued working on his paper on a new method for efficiently calculating numerical solutions of the Kepler equation for all eccentricities and mean anomalies.

Murison continued in spare time to work on a new restricted three-body code intended for research on (natural) satellite capture.

Murison and Behr flew to Tucson for an observing run on the Steward Observatory 90-inch telescope on Kitt Peak. Upgrades of the dFTS were installed, including the new M-lens and an image slicer for the dFTS back end. The purpose of the image slicer is to slice the 50-micron star image (after it passes through the interferometer portion of the instrument) into smaller pieces and then recombine them on top of each other to, in effect, produce an image that fits within a single 12-micron pixel at the CCD camera. As a proof of concept, a two-slice design was implemented, wherein a 25 micron final image was attempted. Unfortunately, mechanical spacing issues were encountered: the various apparatus that hold the slicer mirrors in place physically bumped into each other and prevented one of the interferometer channel beams from recombining with the other two. Murison altered a couple of parts down in the 90-inch metal shop so that the components can now be mounted. We decided to go with a "1-slice" design for the first night, then switch to the 2-slice design, in order to provide a good comparison to rate the performance of the 2-slice design and the slicer concept.

Murison and Behr also fabricated a new, smaller, thermal enclosure for the dFTS so that it could move upstairs to the telescope control room. This considerably simplified the logistics of observing.

Our first night of observing was successful for the first half. After that we had to close the dome due to clouds and high winds. The new guider box performed very well, as did the M-lens and the new (one-slice) slicer design. We got good radial velocity and spectral data on several double-line spectroscopic binaries.

We were clouded out for the rest of the observing run.