Author: corie

ALS is down for the month of July and the first week or so of August. We are taking the opportunity to do a bunch of preventative maintenance on our beamlines. Some of the items include: – cleaning the Be window on 502 (may help to decrease scatter in images) – replacing air lines –…

From July 2017 to May 2018, the BCSB received (and shipped back after beamtime) 758 dewars. Most of these were handled by Anthony. Wow!

During the January shutdown, we decided to test the two Q315R detectors that used to live in beamlines 5.0.1 and 5.0.2. Fortunately, they still work! Once Gemini is commissioned (at the end of this year, if all goes well) then we will have to take the Pilatus out of 5.0.1 and move it over to…

Recently, Marc helped a user run some crystals which the user had arranged to have grown in zero-gravity. Here are pictures of the crystal capillaries mounted at the beamline, and the raster grid used to locate crystals within a capillary.

Another one of those Mondays at the beamline:

We held a jelly bean counting contest at our booth at the ACA. Matt Clifton of Nurix was the winner. Good job, Matt!    

Once again, the BCSB teamed up with several other groups at the ALS to host a booth at the ACA. It was great to hang out with our ALS colleagues and to see many of our users.        

Sadly, today was Charlie Eigenbrot’s last PRT meeting, since he is retiring from Genentech in June. We will miss him! (But we do hope we comes back to visit us periodically at the synchrotron)

We are back up from the long ALS shutdown, and the beamlines are in good shape. We completed a number of projects on the sector 5 beamlines, in particular, as well as performed maintenance on a number of systems: – Pilatus3 6M installed on 5.0.1. The install went well, and tests with x-rays show that…

The next test is to run the 501 and 502 Pilatus detectors simultaneously off the same PPU.