monitoring distant telescope status

5:24. Messaged Mr Lane, the human steward for MRO. I asked what ways I could determine if the Mini-Robotic Observatory would be running, without using Facebook. Or if it was possible to have some sort of official and indicative response from within the Communicator app. Shared the error message resulting from a "status" command.

5:53. Dave replied. He said he expected the refractor to be running "most clear nights (including tonight) now that it has a roof and a reasonable likelihood it won't be rained on."

He also said he has a "message of the day" mechanism to post a message on the queue web pages. OK, good stuff. It shows up as an "Important Notice" and it gets appended to status replies. He also provided the links to the "Public Messages." All right. These will be useful.

Then Dave encouraged me to have stuff in the queue. If it was sparse he'd fill it up with stuff. Roger!

8-ish. I wanted to get a job in the MRO hopper. In the backyard, I briefly wondered how to go about that. "Hold the phone." (heh heh, see what I did there?). Installed the Communicator app on new Motorola e6. Configured my profiles.

Considered the comet C/2017 T2 as it was near galaxy M109, according to an entry I had made in my astronomy Google calendar. Checked SkyTools. Well... the comet had moved on now. Messier 109 would not be in the field anymore. But it was nearing an NGC! OK!

Queued it using star GSC 03833 00845.