Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2000 07:41:41 -0700 From: "s. a. snedden" Subject: 2.5-meter Obs Log (MJD 51604) TUESDAY FEBRUARY 29, 2000 (MJD 51604) APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY SDSS 2.5m OBSERVING LOG Observing team: --------------- Ellyne Kinney (early) (APO) Jeffrey Hayes (early) (APO) Steph Snedden (late) (APO) Bing Chen -- PT (JHU) Visitors: --------- Scott Burles (FNAL) -- PIC David Schegel (PU) Connie Rockosi (UC) Jim Gunn (PU) The plan: ========= We will continue our spectroscopic commissioning if the weather permits, and after midnight or 02:00, change over to imaging so we can experiment with and commission the end-to-end DA. Synopsis for night: =================== Cloudy weather prevented us from opening for the entire night. A few bias scans were taken with the imager, and some spectroscopic arcs and flats, but no tapes were shipped. Connie worked on the imager for most of the night. Telescope Status: ================= The telescope was balanced for spectroscopy (300V), with the corrector and cartridge 4/plate 268 on. The telescope was left with this cartridge on, at an altitude of 30 degrees. Interlocks: ----------- None bypassed. Software used: -------------- IOP: V3_8_7 SOP: V3_8_7 Watcher: V2_6_3 MCP: NoCVS Weather Synopsis (see below for hourly data): ============================================= Quite cloudy to start out, with little or no respite for the rest of the night. No precipitation. General Comments (see Problems below for details): ================================================== Connie spent the night working on debugging the MCP control of the imager optical bench latches. It was displaying the opposite of the commanded t-bar position. If you latched them, the MCP display would register unlatched and vice-versa. She believes it is a switched wire somewhere in the camera, and by sunrise had the problem almost fixed. Larry C., Scott and Jeffrey experimented with the SP1 and managed to get it in focus -- this was successful at about 19:30. Larry is thinking about putting proximity sensors in the spectrographs so that we can know exactly where the slit heads are. More on this later. Ellyne and RHL worked on trying to find out why the ALT and AZ amplifiers seem to be spontaneously aborting. They found that powering them down for 1 hr will clear the problem for about 2 hours, and then the problem recurs. See PR 868 below. It was also noticed that the alignment clamp seems to come on by itself at random times. During the second half of the night, the Watcher reported one axis abort for the rotator, but not the alt or az, when a stop button was in and aborts for all three axes showed on the MCP Menu. All amplifiers for all axes had the forward, reverse, and bidirectional inhibit LEDs on (red), as well as the coil current LED. Normally the watcher reports an abort for all three axes when the stop button is hit. It's not clear why the watcher later reported another abort for just the rotator. Scott took some arcs & flats while waiting (in vain) for clear skies. The arcs were taken to recollimate and get all the fibers back on the CCDs. The flats were taken while rocking the collimator to measure the gain. Data Acqusition (see IOP/SOP output below): =========================================== Imaging: -------- Run 1222: Bias of 35 frames Run 1223: Bias of 1223 frames These were not archived to tape. They are in /data/photo/51604 for the moment. Spectroscopic: -------------- Cartridge 4/plate 268: Mounted, but only some arcs and flats taken by Scott. These were not archived to tape, but can be found in /data/spectro/51604. endNight -copy was run at the end of the night. Mirrors: ======== PRIMARY: -------- MIGS Axial A=1.9310 Axial B=0.5574 Axial C=0.5574 Transverse D=0.3964 Lateral E=1.9829 Lateral F=0.4809 GALILS Commanded: 000004850, -000002350, 000000100, -000009500, 000000050, -000000100 Actual: 000004850, -000002350, 000000100, -000009500, 000000050, -000000100 SECONDARY: ---------- Focus: 0.0 Temp: 3.20 C Altitude: 90.0 MIGS Axial A=-1.1770 Axial B=-1.1390 Axial C=-1.1749 Transverse D=-0.1829 GALILS Commanded: 001334900, 001322050, 001311750, -000006200, -000010850 Actual: 001403246, 001392771, 001397640, -000006200, -000010850 LN2 schedule: ============= Imager: ------- No dewar changes. The 180-l dewar was just under half-full by 06:15. The day staff will need to keep an eye on it. Spectro1: --------- Filled at 00:00. Topped off at 06:15. Spectro2: --------- Filled at 00:00. Topped off at 06:15. PROBLEMS: ========= PR 868 -- AZ axis spontaneouly aborts ------------------------------------- While running the MCP, we were unable to reset the Az amps. We were getting a bad status from the interlocks az_mtr1_rdyand az_mtr2_rdy. We tried disabling the monitor in the MCP, resetting the amps from the front panel of the Glenteks and turning off the power, waiting 10 seconds and powering back on. None of these worked. We then powered the amps off for about 1 hour, powered them back on and when we tried to reset the amps it did work. This was all done with the same version of the MCP, so we think this is a hardware problem. After an hour of operation we got the abort state back for both Az and Alt (Az/Alt_mtr1/2_rdy) and could not reset the brakes. We checked the front panel of the Glenteks and the following LEDS were red: Bidirectional Inhibit, Forward Inhibit, Reverse Inhibit on all Az and Alt Glenteks plus Closed Coil on both Alt Glenteks. A reset from the front panels cleared the Bidirectional Inhibit, and the Closed Coil LEDs. A theory from JEG is that when the amps abort or the telescope comes out of closed loop, the Forward, Reverse and Bidirectional Inhibit come on as they should, but if the observers put the brakes on and possibly when they throw a stop button then the telescope does not come out of closed loop and the telescope is being actively held in place with the brakes which may cause the amps to abort. PR 869 -- Watcher(v2_6_3) is not reporting Archiver Node and Imager Voltage status ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Currently under the Arch System Details, none of the nodes have little boxes around them (they appear flat and the middle mouse button does not fix them) and when we try to get more detailed info on a specific node we get no incorrect status information. We later discovered this was also true for imager CCD voltages and temperatures. We tried stopping and restarting watcher and went from wrong information to no information. We also checked the servers and they seemed to be operational. The data in the Real Time interface appears to be correct (i.e. it agrees with the status entries from statusDump. We checked to see if the packeteer was running, it was: im> schedule list command arguments interval (s) ------- --------- ------------ camHandler {} 60.0 daHandler {} 10.0 listenerToPort file8 5.0 packeteer file8 {astrolineData astrolineError \ imData imError imDaData imDaError \ cameraNomData cameraNomError qaData \ qaError serverError criticalError} 9.0 rtHandler {} 10.0 Variable show_scheduled_errors is not set im> We tried reconnecting to the servers, which we could do but it did not help the problem: dropping server connection to sdsshost.apo.nmsu.edu on port 30307 (server) connected: registered We could plot data, it just wasn't showing up in the Tcl interface. We then restarted the servers. This fixed the problem. We are concerned that there was no obvious indication of something wrong with the imager or master server. We could connect to them, we could query them for information, and the watcher was able to get some, but not all information. Were some handlers not getting updated? We really don't know. The danger, of course, is that we could have CCDs warming up and we would not know, because the watcher appears okay (until you look for system details). Weather Data: ============= Wind Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Precip. 16:01 41 8 4 263 (W) 332 mcl none 17:01 38 4 1 356 (N) 277 mcl none 18:01 40 -20 0 352 (N) 279 mcl none 19:01 38 -16 4 194 (SSW) 272 mcl none 20:01 37 -19 5 185 (S) 202 mcl none 21:01 39 -19 7 234 (SW) 158 mcl none 22:01 39 -16 9 253 (WSW) 286 mcl none 23:01 38 -5 9 274 (W) 514 mcl none 00:01 39 1 9 272 (W) 667 mcl none 01:01 38 4 6 224 (SW) 642 mcl none 02:01 38 8 11 237 (WSW) 699 mcl none 03:01 38 12 8 231 (SW) 845 mcl none 04:01 38 10 15 218 (SW) 806 mcl none 05:01 39 6 16 185 (S) 958 mcl none 06:01 39 8 17 177 (S) 1015 mcl none Data Logs from IOP/SOP: ======================= Not available.