Mitchell, Betsy, Corey, Robert

Today I damped the MC baffles and took beamspot photos. More on this later.  For now, I want to give some details about the unplanned baffle I installed.

While taking beam spot pictures I noticed an extremely bright retro-reflection seen by MC3. I had noticed this before (and also a similar glint for PRM). But this was the first time I was using the IR Illumintor and camera at this location. I use bracketing so that I could attempt to avoid saturation since the idea is to be quantitative. I had not previously realized how bright this reflection was – it completely saturated the pixels even with short exposures (see Fig. 1).

So, with creative help form Mitchell, Betsy and Corey, we baffled the glint. Figure 2 shows that the baffle is clamped to a HAM2 wall fixture and projects out about 2 cm from the wall to hide the glint surface from the MC3 beamspot.