The alarm woke us up — the alert buzzer in the clock. Scared us badly, it’s loud, and last night we forgot to turn it off. We jumped up, figured out what was going on, and after that sleep was out of the question. Went on comm; Volodya was running it. Today I had to correct him — he starts with trivia, forgets the essentials, and squeezes them in at the end. The day was full of complex work yet chaotic, which is incompatible. We don’t have firm confidence that the star tracker AO-1 and sextant S-2 are working correctly, although the station’s rotations from “Delta” are right in timing, speed, and direction.

So today we asked for permission to independently verify the sextant S-2 on stars and proposed our test methodology. They agreed. Zeroing out the instruments, we placed Alpha Cygni in the center of the star tracker AO-1 and the optical sight.

At that moment, in the sextant the star was at the edge of the ten-minute ring on the left. We took the sextant’s zero reading and got the misalignment between AO-1 and S-2. The ground says that with such misalignment, errors in computing the settings are possible. They proposed that we work on 6 sources during a single thirty-minute shadow pass. We tried — the task proved unrealistic, since after each programmed rotation only 3-4 minutes remained for identifying stars, refining orientation by AO-1 from the work compartment, then stabilizing by S-2 from the transfer compartment. Plus time was needed for the photography that was the whole point. So we had to limit ourselves to three sources.

Exhausted. Days rush by like in a chariot — you don’t notice them. It’s a shame when you become not the master but the servant of the equipment.