Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 13:33:05 GMT
From: observer@apo.nmsu.edu
Subject: 2.5m obslog 20060130 (MJD 53766)
                       APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY SDSS 2.5M
                                 OBSERVING LOG
                            Monday January 30, 2006
                                  (MJD 53766)
---=== OBSERVING TEAM ===---
Swing: K. Pan
Night: S. Snedden, J. Barentine
Support: Craig Loomis (phone)
---=== OBSERVING PLAN ===---
        Science!
---=== OBSERVING SUMMARY ===---
A long, productive night of spectroscopy (while we waited out the clouds)
and imaging.  We finished one seguefaint plate (2417) and obtained about half
the total required signal on a second (2398).  In imaging we observed:
        SEGUE Stripe 1356 from   +51   caget tpm_TM_PMSSAvg tpm_TM_TelairAvg.VALA
        tpm_TM_PMSSAvg                2.160
        tpm_TM_TelairAvg.VALA         4.681
                               b1    r1    b2    r2
        Mean Offset           .47   -.30   .00   -.09
        Recommended Piston          2720         830
        Indicated that some adjustment should be made for average night
temperature, around 0 C. But Steph prefers not to make any change
since the spectrogaph was happy through whole last night which
had very similar conditions with tonight, presumablly. So no change is
made.
Plate Database Error
--------------------
Tonight when entering the database information for Plate 2417 (entering one
exposure and declaring the plate done), we encountered an error in which the
database accepted the declaration but the actual web page did not reflect
this.  Entering exposures often resulted in an error message.  By the time we
thought to copy the error message, we could no longer reproduce the error.
This also occured last Saturday night (MJD53764), and in both occasions from
our laptops running Safari under Mac OS X.  We *think* this may have been just
user error (trying to update the database before logging into the plate-mapper
web page, but just for the record...)
goDrift Becomes Flummoxed; Times Out
------------------------------------
During the setup for imaging Run 1600, goDrift timed out, apparently thinking a
slew was still in progress even though we're sure the slew from the gotoField
was finished.  Pertinent watcher errors:
Text="Could not queue a write to user:message output dies": (2006-01-31
10:10:06Z)
Facil="SYSTEM":VMSMsg:"DEVOFFLINE" (2006-01-31 10:10:06Z)
Facil="SYSTEM":VMSMsg:"HANGUP" (2006-01-31 10:10:06Z)
Text="Write to user failed:output terminates to user7": (2006-01-31 10:10:06Z)
We also note this error *during* the slew on the gotoField:
tracking (Excessive Az Tracking Error:: 2006-01-31 10:06:09Z)
And last but not least, it appears we neither missed a fiducial crossing nor
were there errors too large to correct.