Subject: 2.5m obslog 19990914 (MJD 51436) Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 05:17:49 -0600 (MDT) From: hayes@apo.nmsu.edu Tuesday September 14, 1999 Apache Point Observatory SDSS 2.5m Observing Log (MJD 51436) Observing Team: Jeffrey Hayes (APO) Ellyne Kinney (APO) Connie Rockosi (UC) Scott Burles (UC) Robert Lupton (PU) Steve Kent (FNAL) Craig Loomis (APO) -- remote On for tonight, spectroscopy. We have cartridge 4 and plate 202 on from last night. The counterweights are set to 290V. We completed the pre-flight checkout of the telescope by 17:30 and were ready to go. At 18:00 humidity stood at 64% and ominous clouds to the NW. (A feeling of deja-vu comes over one here.) We started the TPM log at about 16:50. No apparent problems with the NFS deamon tonight. In deference to comments made by the day-folk, the name of the TMP log is 51436.dat At 18:50, the humidity rose to over 80% and 2/3 of the sky was overcast. It was clearly raining at Holloman AFB. We shut off the fan in the bottom of the 2.5m building to avoid getting condensate on the optics. At 20:20, it started to rain -- even though the humidity was at 74%. Thunder could be heard off from the NW. At 22:30, the wind shifted out from the NE -- just where the storm came from. The humidity stood at ~60%, but we had a lot of standing water everywhere. By 23:50 it dried out enough to start the all-sky camera, but then the cloud cover was pretty bad. By 00:40, the cloud cover cleared out enough to open the 2.5m, but we had to keep an eye on the humidity as it was trending upwards again. The DIMM was set up at this time but we could get Polaris through the cloud cover. This would seem to indicate that the seeing was not what one would have hoped for. We switched to cartridge 1 and plate 214 (centre = 0,0) and were on the sky by 01:30. We kept a TCC window open just to monitor the positional information between the TCC and the MCP so that we can try and avoid run-aways. On our initial slew to the field, we managed to get guide stars down the fibers. We found that we could not get the guider images over to /data/spectro/guider. When we did a "gcam doread" in the TCC we obtained the error message: "GCamReply='could not open file: guider images:gimg0001.fits; error: No Error'" Upon investigation, we found that the guider Mac could not automount a disk (we speculate /data/spectro/) and this is the reason for the failure to get images from the guide camera. Scott tried the idea of using the "visitor1" account info to get the guider Mac to automount the appropriate disk, but still no luck. At this point we called Craig Loomis. It turns out that the "pcnfsd" on sdsshost had to be kicked in order to get the images transfered over properly. Also it appears that in the initial rush to get the guider back on line, that we chose the wrong portion of the sdsshost directory to mount. A further restart of the guider Mac cured that problem. We were up and guiding again at 03:15. We noticed that at 03:20 the humidity started to rise rather rapidly (back up to 71%). At about 03:30 we started a real guide on plate 214. We started with a 900s integration. The focus through all the cirrus was set to 1600. The seeing, estimated from the guider images, was about 2''. We went to change back to cartridge 4/plate 204 at 04:00 but we had to reboot the MCP twice. The first time, the Menu just became unresponsve, while for the second we obtained the now familiar "Waiting for next frame" msg. Ellyne filed a bug report about this via the Princeton "gnats" page. By this time, it was 04:45, the clouds rolled in and the humidity went over 80%. We therefore closed up for the night. NOTICE: When opening the building, be aware that there is a steel block mounted on the North side rail just before the stop. Do not roll the building all the way to the stop when moving E, as one will hit this block. (The block is for the temporary telescope tent [TTT].) LN2 schedule: SP1: 17:00; 03:00 SP2: 17:15; 03:20 Imager dewar: We finished up at 05:15. Jeffrey and Ellyne