Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 02:07:25 -0600
From: "s. a. snedden"
Subject: 2.5m obslog 990830 (MJD 51422)
                          Monday August 30, 1999
                              (MJD 51422)
                   Apache Point Observatory SDSS 2.5m
                           Observing Log
The Afternoon's Team:
                Ellyne Kinney (APO)
                Jeffrey Hayes (APO)
                Stephanie Snedden (APO)
                Connie Rockosi (UC)
                French Leger (FNAL)
This afternoon French centered the LVDTs. The telescope should now stay
well centered in the wind baffle, and seemed to do so.
We also determined that the problem we had on Friday with the windscreen
was in fact, a balance problem. We did not try a wide enough range of
counterweight positions on Friday. The balance with the two
spectrographs, corrector and engineering camera is quite a bit more than
the value that worked with the "dummy weights" in use before spectro 2
was installed. The new value for the counterweights in this
configuration is 425 (with empty dewars).
We next tested slewing the telescope using the TCC track command. The
first slews were tried with mount coordinates. The telescope did not
move, but there were also no error messages. If we used "obs" or "fk5"
coordinates, the slew proceeded normally. After trying another "axis
init", we were able to slew in mount coordinates with no problems.
Offsets:  When we first tried an "offset calib 0.1,0" command, we got
the following error messages:
    Modu="prt_ReadReply Set" Too many replies on port LTA19
                             ERR:BADTIME
    Modu="axe_o Move" command failed for TEL2
We tried "offset calib 0,0" and "offset calib 0,0.1" both of which
worked with no problems. We tried "offset calib 0.1,0" again, and the
second time it also worked. Apparently offsets are working, assuming our
initial problem was unrelated to the offset command.
Just before sunset, clouds started moving in from the SSE, and we closed
up. Our plans for the evening were to collimate the primary with Connie,
but the clouds never cleared enough for us to open (A fair number of of
sucker holes though). We will try again tomorrow.
Ellyne, Jeffrey & Steph