late nights with large vacuum equipment

Tonight we installed the Output Mode Cleaner into HAM6. The Output Mode Cleaner is a new piece of optoelectromechanical equipment that will filter the light coming out of LIGO and enable a new, better way of reading out the signal in our search for gravitational waves. It sits in this huge tank that will be evacuated of air. It sits on top of the Internal Seismic Isolation, another recently installed, highly instrumented piece of expensive machine work that resembles, to me, nothing so much as a moon-lander. The Output Mode Cleaner will star prominently in my thesis.