Subject: obs log 51602 27feb00 Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 06:51:01 -0700 (MST) From: sjnk@apo.nmsu.edu (Scot Kleinman) SUNDAY FEBRUARY 27, 2000 (MJD 51602) APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY SDSS 2.5m OBSERVING LOG Observing team: Jeffrey Hayes (early) (APO) Ellyne Kinney (early) (APO) Scot Kleinman (late) (APO) Atsuko Kleinman (late) (APO) Bing Chen -- PT (JHU) Visitors: Scott Burles (FNAL) David Schlegel (PU) Connie Rockosi (UC) Jim Gunn (PU) The plan: We are continuing to have problems with the primary mirror oscillating. Work was done on this during the day by French, Larry and JEG. It was decided at the Sloan-o-con to concentrate on getting the optics right, test them, and then perform spectroscopy commissioning tasks. If the weather holds and we have a great deal of luck, we can try for imaging during the second half of the night. Bottom line: One successful spectro plate. Bad weather rest of night. Interlocks: None bypassed. Weather: Fair with developing cirrus at 16:30. Clouds coming in as the night progressed. TPM: logged to tpm-51602.dat and tpm-51602-2.dat. At 17:00, the primary was declared happy by JEG. We moved to do the telescope checkout at that time. We were done by 17:30. We tried a suggestion by French for getting the exhaust fan to go -- we turned off the HVAC in the S side control panel (the same panel as one turns on the exhaust fan from), and then turned on the exhaust fan switch. It started up fine, but we were left with a red flashing light and a faint warning beep. We are not sure if this is benign and request this be investigated by the day folks. (Both were turned off at the end of the night.) Cartridge 3 and plate 265 was still from last night, and was to be used first thing tonight. The guider worked fine - having taken an image before the checkout. No rebooting of the guider Mac was needed tonight. Connie took imager biases starting at about 16:30: run 1216. At 17:30 we left the enclosure in darkness so that the spectroscopy people could try and track down the (still extant) light leak. We opened at 19:00 and homed and relaxed the mirrors. We were on the field (265) by 19:30, with stars in the fibers(!) At 22:00 we changed to cartridge 4 and plate 266. Using the Web interface for the plug plates, we declared plate 265 for tile 68 done. We also found that the focus had changed quite a bit: we ended up changing the focus from 1450 to 1350 for this new plate. At 01:30, we loaded cartridge 7 plate 279. By 01:40, we were going to the field, debugging SOP's gotoField in the process. Clouds were pretty thick and weather conditions: Air: Telescope: Pressure 21.46 inHg Structure 7.05 C Humidity 14.7% Primary C Temp 7.2 C Secondary 6.48 C Dewpoint -17.9 C Diff 25.1 C 15 min Min 25.1 C Dust, particles/0.1 cu.ft: Tower 0.3u 31057 Enclosure 0.3u 33610 Tower 1.0u 1185 Enclosure 1.0u 1594 Wind: Wind, last 15 minutes: Speed 24.8 mph Gust Speed 30.2 mph Dir 186.0 degrees Gust Dir 205.6 degrees Focus value: 1300. Initial pointing was off about 12" N and 8" E. (We had to move S and W). FWHM of guide stars was around 1.8 to 2"; the DIMM was reading 1". Clouds were pretty pervasive, though. David and Scott diagnosed why cartridge 4's guider images were so bad - the guider flat shows it was out of focus. The profilometry looked ok, though. David filed a PR on it. This raises a good commissioning test we should do - test the guider camera focus on ALL cartridges; this might explain earlier results (from last month) when most of the cartridges seemed out of focus. Tonight, cartridges 3 and 7 agree with each other, but the focus for cartridge 4 is out. Clouds weren't cooperating, so at ~2:00, we started postCalibs and set off to switch to the imager. During the imager switch, the MCP (26Feb 00 - no tagged name: iop's mcpVersion reports: NOCVS|Feb 26 2000|12:51:30) crashed. This was after we had unlatched the slitheads and put in the alt pin. Atsuko did a shift 6 0 to move the counterweights down (yes, we know 0 isn't allowed, but it usually complains and lets us try again). She can't remember if the 0 showed up on the screen or not, but at that point it crashed. We had to reboot to recover (and reset the fiducials). We mounted the imager, then moved the enclosure over the building as the clouds were increasing and already quite thick. (Plus the moon was rising.) We closed up for good around 05:30. There was no room in the cartridge garage, so we left the last cartridge with the corrector attached in the dome, although we weren't very happy with this solution. Where should we store the extra carts/corrector? Atsuko successfully ran endNight -doSpectro in a sop window. :> Initial Mirror positions: ------------------------- prim stat 0 4 I Received=" 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 axis homed" 0 4 I Received=" 000004850, -000002350, 000000100, -000009500, 000000050, -000 000100 commanded position" 0 4 I Received=" 000004850, -000002350, 000000100, -000009500, 000000050, -000 000100 actual position" sec stat 0 4 I Received=" 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 axis homed" 0 4 I Received=" 001532900, 001520000, 001509700, -000004750, -000009400 comma nded position" 0 4 I Received=" 001537123, 001524071, 001513552, -000004750, -000009400 actua l position"