Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1998 05:39:20 -0700 (MST) From: Tia Hoyes Subject: 3.5m obslog 980323 MONDAY MARCH 23, 1998 APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY OBSERVING LOG ACTUAL ASTRONOMER INSTRUMENT DATE START FINISH Fan DIS 3/23 16:40 00:06 Turner DIS 3/23 00:07 00:47 Fan DIS 3/23 00:48 06:00 INST SCHEDULED OBS WEATH EQUIP DAY NOTUSED I/RS/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B PU02/S 19:40 23:30 3.8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 PU01/S 23:30 00:10 0.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 PU02/S 00:10 04:39 3.1 1.1 0 0 0.3 0 0 0 0 (note: times listed include instrument change time) ACTIVITY LOG The telescope was opened at 18:05. Michael Strauss and Xiaohui Fan were on site to observe for the PU02 program. Comments: The first half of the night was plagued by clouds, and sometimes horrendous seeing, while the second half cleared off, and was quite productive. We lost some time to telescope troubles; the guider gave us some trouble as well, but we lost essentially no time to that. A light left on at the SDSS operations building caused noticeable scattered light on the red side of DIS before we noticed it and turned it off. Two pet peeves: first, there is so much extraneous information posted on the mcnode window, that useful information quickly is lost from the screen. At one point, I entered a dis wipe=on command to clear the chip, but had mis-typed it. I missed the error message that resulted, and thereby lost 5 minutes. The terminal should at least beep when there is something important like "I didn't understand your last command" appears on the screen. Second, the red CCD on DIS continues to have a severe problem of residual charge left from bright stars. The bleed trails from the direct images of bright stars from the QSO monitoring program persist for several hours (even after doing a dis wipe, which I eventually typed correctly), which plays havoc on faint-object spectroscopy. The problems that occurred were as follows: the GUIDER MAC crashed, and the it had to be restarted. Once it was restarted, it worked fine. The telescope lost it's place when we were doing quite a few exposures in the same part of the sky. I assumed this was due to the fact that the magnasensor had not been passed over. At this time, I turned th motors off and on, initialized the axis and slewed the telescope over numerous magnasensors, thus, fixing the problem. PU02 only lost 0.3 hours due to this problem. I observed 0957 for the Lens Monitoring run and also AR CVn. At the very end of the evening, per Tom Harrison's request, we observed a bright nova. (* means a trouble report has been issued or appended to) FOCUS LOG MARCH 23, 1998 Best Telescope Wind Seeing Time Inst Focus Az El Temp# Dir MPH filter FWHM " 18:45 DIS -75(6542) 96.9 41.2 9.8/10.75 290.7 9.7 IN 1.57 19:05 GUIDER 52000 87.3 77.3 9.9/10.39 289.4 7.9 empty 1.03 20:45 DIS -200(6335) -7.1 47.7 9.8/9.11 254.8 11.5 IN 1.60 20:50 GUIDER 50000 -7.2 47.6 9.8/9.03 249.1 11.3 empty 1.49 00:08 DIS -50(6428) 325.3 56.8 9.6/8.59 222.7 7.1 IN 1.28 01:45 DIS -100(6334) 2.7 60.1 9.8/7.97 268.3 7.0 IN 1.44 # The first temp is air, the second is truss, both in degrees C. WEATHER MARCH 23, 1998 Wind Time Temp F Dewp. MPH. Dir. DUST Sky Precip. 16:01 51 14 18 310 (NW) 187 cirrus none 17:01 51 16 13 303 (WNW) 184 cirrus none 18:01 50 17 8 293 (WNW) 232 cirrus none 19:01 50 16 10 280 (W) 235 cirrus none 20:01 50 17 11 268 (W) 229 cirrus none 21:01 49 16 11 230 (SW) 398 cirrus none 22:01 48 15 9 208 (SSW) 372 cirrus none 23:01 48 14 7 220 (SW) 251 cirrus none 00:01 49 13 9 223 (SW) 283 cirrus none 01:01 49 14 9 246 (WSW) 299 clearing none 02:01 49 12 7 266 (W) 245 clearing none 03:01 49 15 10 308 (NW) 224 clear none 04:01 49 19 15 293 (WNW) 180 clear none 05:01 48 19 17 314 (NW) 210 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: 2.39 Current guide software version:GIm Ctrlv3.0b11. -Tia