From: Rik Hill 
To: "peter cmaChen" ,

Reply-To: Rik Hill 



We use mothballs in the dome track of the observatory to ward them and
ladybugs off. During the recent wildfires here in Az, the fire crews and
Steward Obs. firefighters managed to save it from the fires but when we
went up to check the telescope and remove the corrector for anti-reflection
coating (at a cost of $18,000!) we found that all the moths on the mountain
had taken refuge in our telescope. There were literally thousands of them
and they had all excreted on the corrector. It was covered with moth guano.
When we spooked the moths by opening the dome they all took flight, flying
into our faces and covering us with their excretions. Lovely. When we got
the corrector downtown we had to spend several hours just washing the
glass! It was pretty disgusting. The big problem is that the guano is very
corrosive. When a moth walks across a mirror and leaves its trail the
coating will quickly be eaten away. You don't want them anywhere near
optics.

When I worked on Kitt Peak (at the schmidt there) we had a zapper once. It
ran for less than one night. Do you have any idea what a toasted Miller
moth smells like? Also disgusting.

"Trapping of moths is efficiently done by hand." if there are
only a few of them. When there's thousands it's not feasable.

The mothballs work well for us, are cheap and not offensive, certainly not
as offensive as being wet on by hundreds or thousands of moths when they
are spooked!

-Rik





On Wednesday 13 August 2003 18:25, peter cmaChen wrote:
> Hi folks:
>
>                I came across this interesting article on the
> problem of moths in telescopes and how the people there tried to
> deal with it
>
> http://www.apo.nmsu.edu/Telescopes/SDSS/eng.papers/19970220_Moth/19
>970220.ht ml
>
>    It got me wondering.  Surely many ATMs have come across the same
> or similar problem in their telescopes and enclosures.  Does anyone
> know of other environmentally friendly way - high tech, low tech,
> or folk remedies - to keep insects away from people and scopes?
>
> Regards,
> P.C. Chen

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