Subject: 2.5 m obslog 19991009 (MJD 51461) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 06:28:29 -0600 (MDT) From: hayes@apo.nmsu.edu (Jeffrey Hayes) Saturday October 09, 1999 Apache Point Observatory SDSS 2.5m Observing Log (MJD 51461) Observing Team: Scot Kleinman (APO) Jeffrey Hayes (APO) Steve Kent (FNAL) -- PIC David Schegel (PU) Eric Neilson (JHU) On for tonight, spectroscopy on 4 fields if we can do it. We started the the TPM logging at 18:00, and opened the sky camera at the same time. We started it at 19:00. We set the counterweights to a value of 360 V at the start of tonight. The camera was put in the doghouse as it was determined that it would need to be worked on tomorrow after it safed itself yesterday. We were on the sky at 20:30 with cartridge 2 and plate 192. Scot was the driver of the "sop" portion for tonight. We had to reboot the electronics for SP1 with David's help, and discovered that after such a reboot an "iack" is required in "sop" so that the electronics come back properly. We had to reboot the mechanicals for SP2 at 20:50 as indicated by the watcher. We had some problems talking to the mechanicals initially through "sop" but we managed to get the spectrographs to respond to lower level commands fine, and so continued on. Scot also had problems with a TCC telnet session: it spontaneously dumped him off, and he had to start anew. We then had a problem in getting the guider to respond. We could not get any responses from a simple "gcam doread" command. It turned out that the problem was 2 fold: the guider Mac was down (due to a UPS getting fried); and we tried to perform a "gcam doread" and we set the instrument block up before the guider Mac was up. This caused port LAT11 on the TCC side to hang, and so we had to telnet to the Xyplex server t-g-sdss-2 2000 and kill off the session on port 11. After resetting the instrument block on the TCC we could successfully take guider images. We had this solved by 22:10. Plate 192/cartridge 2: (22h30m) we set the focus at 1600 and obtained decent images. We obtained pre-science calibration flats and line spectra at 22:30. Science data was started at 22:44. We obtained 4 science integrations with this plate as the first integration had poor S/N and the first 2 did not guide as well as expected. We did the post-science calibrations at 00:25. Plate 218/cartridge 4: (00h30m) We swapped cartridges starting at about 00:45 and were done by 01:30. This included filling the dewars. Note, that camera 3 on SP2 came up to ~200K just before we changed cartridges. The reason is that, in order not to get the mechanicals to hang, we took exclusive control of the spectrographs, which is why the watcher could not pick up on this. While running exclusive sessions on the spectrographs we will monitor the temperature manually after each science integration. Focus was set to 1400. We started the first science integration at 02:07. We finished up this plate at 03:30, after 4 900s integrations. Plate 209/cartridge 5: (03h07m) We started trying to guide on this plate 03:45, but we could not find any starts down fibers. We then tried the "easyFiber" command in "sop" to try and find an FK5 star. Still no luck. We zeroed out all the offsets, and again, no luck. We also tried to centre up on Aldebaran, and again had no success. A series of tests with focus and offsets still did not give a star down any of the fibers. We then did a "track 121,30 mount" to test the fiducial positions (i.e. had we drifted?). The telescope was in the position we commanded it too. We were then left to conclude that there might be a problem in the co-ordinates of the plate centre, or a bad plate map. We finally managed to get Aldebaran down fiber 10 using the "starInFiber" command in "sop". We then moved the star to fiber 4 and found it there, but when we tried to move the star back to fiber 10, we got a TCC message saying the slew was too fast, we should reissue the track command, and we noticed the rotator was tens of off its commanded position. We also found that the focus was radically differnt than any of the values used this evening. At 05:40 Aldebaran had an ALT = 68 degrees -- not very close to zenith. Note that all through this exercise, the MIG mirror values reported were close to what we have recorded below (i.e. no more than a 20 to 40% change). At 05:50, we decided to drop the cartridge so visually inspect it. There were no obvious differences and David checked the profilometry -- this was okay. We now think something may be amiss with the optics. Plate 235/cartridge 1: (05h30m) We did not get to this plate. It was put on the telescope when we closed up for the night. LN2 fill schedule: SP1: 18:00; 01:00; 06:10 SP2: 18:15; 01:15; 06:20 TMP file names: /mcptpm/tpm-51461.dat /mcptpm/tpm-51461-2.log Output from MIGS: [MIG,tMIG,0,I] MIG Channel 1 = 2.005000 [MIG,tMIG,0,I] MIG Channel 2 = 0.638000 [MIG,tMIG,0,I] MIG Channel 3 = 0.636500 [MIG,tMIG,0,I] MIG Channel 4 = 1.425000 [MIG,tMIG,0,I] MIG Channel 5 = 1.906500 [MIG,tMIG,0,I] MIG Channel 6 = 0.407500 [MIG,tMIG,0,I] MIG Channel 7 = 1.500000 [MIG,tMIG,0,I] MIG Channel 8 = 1.647000 Other problems: We had problems getting the DIMM up and running. It seems that the CCD on the back of the Meade is loose (i.e. one can turn it by hand), and so the DIMM alogrithm does work, as the starts are not a horizontal pair. Also the telescope will not stay where pointed (this at Polaris!). Additionally, we had problems with the all sky camera, which seemed to function fine at both the h/w end here and the s/w end at Washington, but we never saw an update of the image on the Web page and when a "scanstop" was issued, the camera did not stop scanning. This is rather puzzling. Seeing: Eric indicated that the seeing was very variable all night, but trending towards better as the night went on. We were getting anywhere from 1.5'' to 4'' over the course of the night as measured by the PT. We finished up at 06:15. Jeffrey and Scot