From: "Camron Hastings" Subject: 3.5-meter Night Log 980622 - Addition Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 06:04:31 -0600 Monday, June 22nd, 1998 APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY 3.5-Meter Observing Log ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT DATE START FINISH ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Tremain T/H/G* SPIcam 6/22-23 21:57 01:10 Margon Margon/Deutsch SPIcam 6/23 01:10 04:14 *Tremaine/Holman/Gladman INST SCHEDULED OBS WEATH EQUIP DAY NOTUSED I/RS/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PU03/S 21:57 01:10 3.2 - 0 - 0 - 0 0 - UW11/R 01:10 04:14 1.2 - 0 - 1.8 - 0 0 - ACTIVITY LOG The enclosure opened this evening at 20:30, clear skies, low wind, and low dust. The night started off with the testing of the new TNO program here at APO. The seeing was reasonable, starting at 1.1". SPIcam performed without any problems, and the attempted goals were met. The second observing run started nearly on time, after a filter wheel change and refilling the SPIcam dewer. Though SPIcam has the ability to go for up to 10 hours without a fill I am told, I think scheduling fill time on all night SPIcam runs is a good idea. I had one night that the dewer only lasted 5-6 hours. I am told this is because the autofill sys may not have topped off correctly, not because of SPIcam. Anyway, 15 mins at around 1am is a good time, so between observing runs, perhaps 15 mins could be allocated for such duties. During the second run we had a second occurrence, that I know of, of the TCC refusing commands. (Timestamp start 02:40) This seemed to be linked to the guide camera operation, or at least was noticed during such. It was found that many lingering processes (7) from the previous observing run may have clogged the system. Also, I restarted the guider Mac, which at first was suspected of being dead. No response from the actual Mac or status requests, which froze my input to the TCC interface. I then manually killed each user process. This cleared the command traffic jam, then a 'telstop', 'telrun', and a restart of the MC seemed to allow everything to restart, except for one. A strange thing, my REMARK window would not allow me to hang up, or reconnect, after multiple restart attempts. The UW REMARK interface logged back in fine. I had to connect as a different user. Afterwards, I logged out of that and was able to reconnect as normal. After that, the telescope lost it's position. Not inst block issue, just plain lost. I stopped the motors, re-inited and slewed to about 3 places on the sky doing pointing corrections, then back. That seemed to fix it. Many smaller problems/inconveniences were spawned by this series of events costing considerable time. This total process did not finish until 04:00! OBSERVER'S COMMENTS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The weather was excellent, photometric with about 0.9 arcsec seeing at the start up to about 1.3 arcsec near the end. 300 second I-band guided exposures were still showing 1.0 arcsec FWHM at the best times. We were successfully able run SPIcam with a small overscan and reading only the lower half of the CCD to reduce the total overhead (clear+read) from 56 sec to 26 sec. The instrument performed flawlessly. Unfortunately at 8:33 UT the guider stopped taking frames and the images began showing trailed stars (we were at ZD 9 degrees and the guider was badly needed). Apparently the guider Mac hung and the TCC also became confused. After Camron valiantly rebooted the guider, killed processes on the TCC, and reset various things, we got back on the sky, but could not find our field. After various fiddling, it was realized that the field was rotated 180 from before because a different instrument block had gotten loaded. Finally at 10:10 UT we were really ready to go after instrument blocks, focus values, filters etc. had been returned to pre-hang positions, had good pointing, and were able to obtain a few more exposures. Everything went well after that. E. Deutsch ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FOCUS LOG June 22nd, 1998 Best Telescope Temp Wind Seeing Time Instr Focus Az El Air/Truss Dir MPH filter FWHM" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 21:10 SPIcam -330/6600 195 43 17.8/20.2 266 14 r' 1.1" 22:05 SPIcam -270/6624 200 42 17.4/18.5 266 13 r' 1.0" 01:35 SPIcam -300/6520 -131 56 16.0/16.4 345 5 I 0.8" WEATHER LOG June 22nd, 1998 Wind Time Temp-F Dewp-F MPH Direction Dust Sky Precip ------------------------------------------------------------------ 16:01 74 17 10 254 (WSW) 365 Clear None 17:01 72 15 13 257 (WSW) 472 Clear None 18:01 72 17 17 260 (W) 438 Clear None 19:01 71 14 15 249 (WSW) 478 Clear None 20:01 67 14 13 263 (W) 526 Clear None 21:01 64 15 8 250 (WSW) 610 Clear None 22:01 64 14 10 267 (W) 527 Clear None 23:01 63 12 9 276 (W) 623 Clear None 00:01 62 13 11 283 (WNW) 575 Clear None 01:01 61 18 10 315 (NW) 593 Clear None 02:01 61 18 14 339 (NNW) 567 Clear None 03:01 61 19 10 346 (NNW) 588 Clear None 04:01 61 18 10 334 (NNW) 608 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 for the 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: 2.41a Current guide software version: GIm Ctrl v3.0b 15.out - Camron Hastings