Hello dear readers (both of you),

Things have not started on a particularly good note. The beamline we're doing our first set of measurements on has had some.... problems. In fact, despite it now being a little past midnight we've been working 16 hours and have yet to achieve alignment on the diffraction instrument. If we cannot get the beam through the diffractometer properly, get the instrument aligned, and get it all together, well, then there's nowhere to put our experiment. Ideally the previous users would not leave the hutch in such poor shape, but that's part of the "shared" access problem at a facility like this. We've now spent a good 15% of our allotted time here doing absolutely nothing (except working our asses off).

But that is often the way of things. The night continues, though without much success. It's 3am and we still have not gotten a sample even mounted in the beamline. We are certainly close, but still not there.

Our primary data collection tool this time is an x-ray CCD camera. Usually we have a point detector that we sweep past the area of interest. The CCD camera has the distinct advantage of having a large area with high resolution. It allows us to collect all the scattering from a particular peak in one place without having to move the sample.

There are some disadvantages however. Most of the area (ie the camera) vs. point detector debates focus on resolution, count rates, efficiency, and things like that. For the moment we''l leave all that discussion to the experts. My major problem with CCD detectors is the company that manufactures them, Roper Scientific/Princeton Instruments. I had to use one of their cameras during graduate school and I detested the foul piece of equipment. I produced an extremely long laundry list of complaints about the camera and the software that controlled it. By the time I came into possession of it, the camera was already quite old. So you'd think, you'd hope, that some of the problems would have been solved in the 10 years between that old piece of junk and a brand spanking new one today. However, you'd be wrong.

So many of the same communications and software bugs that caused problems for me with the decade old camera are also present in this camera as well.
It's been 10 years and they still can't design a camera system that will work and "play nice" with anything else in the computer. sigh.....

Such is the way of things at times.