Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1999 07:15:17 -0700 (MST) From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 990105 Apache Point Observatory, Sunspot, NM Tuesday, January 5th, 1999 3.5-meter Night Observing Log Actual ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT DATE START FINISH ----------------------------------------------------------------------- B.Gillespie C.Hastings Echelle 1/5-6 18:38 05:39 R.McMillan S.Wang ----------------------------------------------------------------------- INST SCHEDULED WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOTUSED I/RS/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B ----------------------------------------------------------------------- EN01/S 18:38 05:39 0 0 0 0 4.6 8.5 0 0 0 -------------- Activity Log -------------- 1st Half Observing Specialist: Camron Hastings The telescope was opened at 22:20 this evening after Shui finished the modifications to the Aperture-Cam mounts. The new aperture center is at 232,174 (Binned 3x3). We focused the camera as well, so now the aperture is sharp, as are the scratches. When rotating the tertiary I noticed that there is a serious lack of position markings. Dan Long helped me, and we had to use our best guess as to which side the pins met each other on. I believe that Karen and Russet have rotated to the NA1 port enough to just know, but I would recommend scribing some indexing marks just to avoid easy mistakes in the future. When taking our first image remotely from the Obs1 Mac we ran into trouble. Craig was well briefed on it and will check it out tomorrow (today). It seems that we would start an exposure and everything would work fine until the integration finished, then as soon as it finished we received an error on the ICC and the Remark window just sat there waiting forever. The error had to do with "Error #103, null values being passed to the Find-Word". Eventually, after starting and restarting enough items we did get it to work. During this time we ascertained that you could make exposures locally on the ICC if need be. Shui decided to wait until Wednesday to finish her mechanical engineering and I took the rest of my time and the rest of the night taking boresite data for the instrument block. 2nd Half Observing Specialist: Russet McMillan At the end of first half Camron and I discovered a couple of problems. The first was some difficulty in pointing, which eventually turned out to be due to a magnasensor error of nearly 12 arcminutes in altitude -- it had occurred a few slews before we discovered it, so I can't say at exactly what time it happened. Later slews were much more accurate. The second problem was with the focus script for the echelle slit camera. It bombed out one time complaining that it couldn't find a star, although one was near the center of the frame. The next two times it was run, the routine was extremely slow -- with one second exposures and 50-step moves it was taking longer than five minutes to do a focus run. Later in the night, a focus run took less than two minutes. Around midnight I centered on a star east of the zenith, and for the next several hours tracked the star in order to measure the field rotation. The center of rotation turned out to be right on top of the star's position -- 198, 214 on the slit viewer. The star moved in a very small half-circle over the course of three hours. I went to a second star, which also barely moved over an hour and a half, dithering around a point near 205, 195. So I tried offsetting the star away from the center of rotation, but its motion was still unclear. Some of the obscurity of motion may have been due to seeing, which had gotten worse (5.2 pixels FWHM at the best, around 2:00, worsening to 11.8 pixels by the end of the night despite refocusing). I think this means either that the pointing model and instrument block are not far off, or else that I was doing something wrong. FOCUS LOG January 5th 1999 Best Telescope Temp Wind Seeing Time Instrmnt Focus Az El Air/Truss Dir MPH filter FWHM" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 23:10 Echelle -681(5452) -048 55 +2.9/+2.2 357 12 ND 3 1.09" WEATHER LOG January 5th 1999 Wind Time Temp-F Dewp-F MPH Direction Dust Sky Precip ------------------------------------------------------------------ 16:01 40 1 14 332 (NNW) clear none 17:01 40 0 14 9 (N) clear none 18:01 39 0 9 353 (N) clear none 19:01 39 0 13 334 (NNW) clear none 20:01 39 0 21 311 (NW) clear none 21:01 38 0 13 323 (NW) clear none 22:01 37 2 14 318 (NW) clear none 23:01 36 2 10 17 (NNE) clear none 00:01 36 0 14 28 (NNE) clear none 01:01 36 4 24 37 (NE) clear none 02:01 36 8 9 0 (N) clear none 03:01 35 10 19 6 (N) clear none 04:01 35 8 21 17 (NNE) clear none 05:01 36 10 16 0 (N) clear none 06:01 37 10 9 357 (N) clear none 07:01 33 11 15 19 (NNE) 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: 2.42a Current guide software version: GIm Ctrl v3.0b 15.out - NCH, RM