Cloudy skies settled in on Sunday, 17 July 2016. I went to the observatory Sunday morning to do some preparations in advance of Monday's replacement carpet installation. While I was doing that there were some sprinkles of rain.

Monday, 18 July, dawned cloudy with rain in the forecast. Missed out on an early morning ISS-Sun transit. By mid-morning when the carpet installers arrived the sky was partly cloudy.

The original carpet was installed in August 2009. After seven years, the old carpet had begun to show a lot of wear and tear from the desert weather and animals, as seen in my report of 17 June 2016 and as seen here before the installers arrived:

The installers first removed the old carpet, cleaned off the old glue, and prepared the concrete pad for installation of the new carpet:

The new carpet was then installed outside of the observatory and inside the observatory:

The final installation looks super:

One glitch did occur. The metal edging that had been ordered was not quite wide enough to wrap around the rounded edges of the concrete + carpet. So they have to order new materials and come back to complete the installation. But I can start using the observatory.

That is, I can use the observatory once the weather improves. About 3 hours after the installation was completed a Monsoon storm arrived with wind and thunder, but very little rain here. Other places nearby got some heavy rain and dust storms. Here's a photo I took at 1633 MST looking west from Oracle towards I-10 and Picacho Peak showing the storms and a dust storm (at right):

I have to reconnect and set up everything inside the observatory that had been disconnected and moved for the carpet installation. After that I will set up the replacement 12" LX600 telescope. I hope to do that later this week, weather permitting.

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