Date: Sun, 1 Mar 1998 07:45:13 -0700 (MST) From: Tia Hoyes Subject: 3.5m obslog 980228 SATURDAY FEBRUARY 28, 1998 APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY OBSERVING LOG ACTUAL ASTRONOMER INSTRUMENT DATE START FINISH Rodgers DIS 2/28 17:35 20:30 Margon DIS 2/28 20:45 00:05 Newberg DIS 2/28 00:05 07:30 INST SCHEDULED OBS WEATH EQUIP DAY NOTUSED I/RS/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B UW03/R 19:22 20:22 0 0.1 0 0 0 0.9 0 0 0 UW09/R 20:22 23:55 2.4 0.1 0 0 1.0 0 0 0 0 UW04/R 00:25 00:25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 UC02/S 23:55 05:09 4.0 0 0 0 1.2 0 0 0 0 (note: times listed include instrument change time) ACTIVITY LOG The telescope was opened at 19:50. Bernadette Rodgers was the first observer for the evening. She began taking some biases and flats, but encountered some strange messages concerning the gratings and turret. Earlier in the day, Richard Lucinio had been working on DIS, and we thought that something from the afternoon may have caused these messages to appear. Richard worked on DIS for about 30 minutes to rectify the problem. Also, there was roughly 10 minutes lost to the eyelid not staying open. It closed after I had opened it, and when I went up to fix it, it slipped again. Bernadette's comments:My run was a total loss due mainly to DIS problems. During calibrations we noticed TURRET and Grating error messages coming from DIS, but we were able to continue. Then when I tried a MOVE to change the grating tilts, I got 'TURRET POSITION INVALID. MOVE ABORTED'. The DIS engineer on-site, Richard, said that he had changed something in the afternoon that was causing an incompatiblity with the controller(!). He spent the next 30 minutes making adjustments, after which we still got the error message but were able to continue. I also noticed that the wavelength positions in the arcs were off about 50 pixels from my last run on 2/23 (hi res mode). We got on the sky with about 20 minutes left in my hour only to find that the eyelid covers had slipped after Tia opened, so she had to go up and open them again, costing about 10 minutes. Finally, we took one 6 minute exposure with DIS, and when it completed it didn't read out!! Don't know what happened to it (subsequent exposes were ok). After that I gave up. Eric Deutsch was the second observer for the evening. Eric had quite a few comments; I will fill in the details: Weather was excellent, and I obtained a few spectra tonight, but had some significant telescope and instrument troubles. Pointing was pretty bad, about 80 arcsec off in various directions. I lost time trying to use the slit viewer to acquire objects. I was able to work around this by switching to DIS imaging mode to do a rough offset, and then use the slit viewer for fine offsets. This was not very efficient, but worked. DIS reset all my gratings during one move with some error about hitting hard limits and resetting, so the calibration images may not be very good.(I did several pointing error corrections, and used the guider but we still seemed to have some trouble pointing.) In the later part of the time, DIS got lost somehow and was not collecting light in either imaging or spectral mode for a while (one 15 min spectrum with no light and then some images). When the DIS controller was restarted, this was fixed, although my time was all but up then.(At this time, I tried to take an image myself, but I think DIS was hung, and we were still getting the weird messages from earlier in the evening, so I decided to reboot Mirella and reinitialize DIS and Home DIS. I noticed that this seemed to clear up the problem.) The slit viewer worked well, although I suspect that the slit viewer is not in focus when DIS is. The guider worked nicely, and was probably very important since pointing was poor. In the early part of the night, the guider "full-field" acquisition frames were only 174x174 instead of the entire chip, but this was easily fixed once I noticed. (The guider was working quite well, and I used the set gscansize=(.1,.1) command to change the field) Susana Deustua was the last observer for the evening. The pointing was having problems, even with the correction, and DIS had the same problem as earlier (no light on image). I had to take the same procedure as earlier. Susana's Comments: The telescope pointing was significantly off, by about 1.5 arcminuts in declination. This meant some time was lost determining what field the telescope was actually pointing to. Rotating the slit worked great, except for not knowing offsets from a fiducial point for each rotation angle. This meant that each time we rotated the slit, we had to image to ensure we were looking at the right field. This, of course, also meant some time ws taken up in field verification. DIS caused some lost time as well, due to malfunctions... couldn't see things on th eslit viewer, Tia had to reboot and recheck several times before DIS worked properly. I would suggest that engineering be done at times when the spectrograph is not scheduled, jsut to keep the down time to a minimum. Overall, probably about 1.2-1.5 hours was lost to instrumentation failures. At least the telescope worked! Between instrument failures and the overhead in getting things started, we probably got going in earnest between 2 and 2:30 am (not very efficient for a visitor new to the system). Once things settled down, it was smooth sailing until dawn. As a last note, when I went to fill the dewars on the observing level in the morning, I found that the DIS was not at rotation value of zero, even after I sent it to zero. The rotation had been off all evening, after being worked on earlier. I then tried to put the telescope in stow position, and it would not move with a command or with the motors off and pulling it down by hand. (* means a trouble report has been issued or appended to) FOCUS LOG FEBRUARY 28, 1998 Best Telescope Wind Seeing Time Inst Focus Az El Temp# Dir MPH filter FWHM " 20:50 DIS +100(5897) 71.6 53.1 -7.5/-7.52 336.5 11.4 IN 1.20 21:00 GUIDER 70000 -43.5 42.9 -7.6/-7.67 334.5 18.8 empty 1.68 00:10 DIS -50(5812) -43.4 28.4 -9.2/-9.22 37.5 10.7 IN 1.65 # The first temp is air, the second is truss, both in degrees C. WEATHER FEBRUARY 28, 1998 Wind Time Temp F Dewp. MPH. Dir. DUST Sky Precip. 16:01 20 -6 11 334 (NNW) 311 clear none 17:01 20 -5 5 281 (W) 257 light cirrus none 18:01 19 -4 9 3 (N) 265 light cirrus none 19:01 19 -5 0 80 (E) 262 light cirrus none 20:01 19 -5 10 337 (NNW) 299 cirrus none 21:01 18 -5 4 19 (NNE) 330 cirrus none 22:01 17 -3 13 346 (NNW) 345 clear none 23:01 17 -3 17 32 (NNE) 365 clear none 00:01 16 -1 23 0 (N) 376 clear none 01:01 15 0 23 8 (N) 362 clear none 02:01 16 -2 19 2 (N) 357 clear none 03:01 15 -9 22 6 (N) 426 clear none 04:01 14 -10 21 15 (NNE) 397 clear none 05:01 15 -21 19 37 (NE) 494 clear none 06:01 15 -19 14 13 (NNE) 483 clear none 07:01 18 -27 17 8 (N) 450 clear none note: the wind was coming from the azimuth listed. The convention used is north=0 degrees, east=90 degrees. The dust count is particles >1 micron per 0.1 cu. ft. TELESCOPE STATUS Primary, secondary, and tertiary mirrors in place and collimated. Primary support system operational. Mirror ventilation system in place. Telescope drives operational. Current Remark version: 2.36 Current guide software version:GIm Ctrlv3.0b11. -Tia