From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20000213 Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 07:04:00 -0700 (MST) SUNDAY FEBRUARY 13, 2000 APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY OBSERVING LOG ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT DATE START FINISH Krisciunas Krisciunas SPIcam 2/13 18:41 19:36 Kent Annis Grim 2/13-14 19:46 05:54 INST SCHEDULED WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOTUSED I/RS/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B UW07/R 18:41 19:41 - 0 - 0 - 1.0 0 - 0 UC08/R 19:41 05:54 0 0 0 0 3.8 6.4 0 0 0 (note: times listed include instrument change time) ACTIVITY LOG (* means a trouble report has been issued or appended to) Observing Specialist: McMillan The weather was mostly clear for much of the night, with nothing worse than thin high clouds. The humidity gradually rose throughout the night, nearly getting within two degrees of the telescope temperature at one point, but never quite reached the limit. A hangup in the connection between the Hub and a couple of ICCs cause a communications failure with GRIM during afternoon checkout. The problem was cleared before the end of twilight, but the observer for UW07 elected to use SPIcam instead of GRIM. During the first focus run, GRIM showed a sudden change in focus at f/10; just as we were converging on a value, the images suddenly began to look like donuts. Eventually we came back to the same value we had found on the first try. I considered some of the tests recommended by Dale Sandford, but they seemed to require too much time, so I left the focus at our best guess and asked the observer to inform me of any sudden change. A few hours later, the observer reported a degradation in image quality and very bad astigmatism, so I moved the optics out of f/10 and back before refocusing. It seemed fairly stable after that. The guider was in use part of the time, although it was primarily useful as a second check on the seeing. When we had adequate guide stars, the guider FWHM showed a fairly good correspondence with the measurements of DIMM -- this is interesting since we have seen much disagreement between DIMM and various instrument over recent weeks. GRIM, as usual, was getting considerably better seeing than either DIMM or the guider. * During second half, the guider shutter began to show signs of not opening fully, as it was starting to vignette the edges of the images irregularly. I saved a few sample images to help in diagnosis. OBSERVER COMMENTS FOCUS LOG FEBRUARY 13 2000 Wind Time Inst Focus Az El #Temp Dir MPH filt FWHM " 18:45 SPIcam 100(288) 226 54 1.5/1.9 239 15 V 1.50 19:55 Grim(f10) 100(382) 131 62 0.9/1.0 270 14 k sh. 0.75 21:15 Grim 160(482) 210 54 2.1/1.2 296 23 kshort 0.85 01:55 Grim 140( ) 1.3/0.4 kshort 0.78 #First temp is air, second temp is telescope. WEATHER FEBRUARY 13 2000 Wind Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Precip. 17:01 38 20 12 278 (W) 364 cirrus none 18:01 35 21 12 266 (W) 461 cirrus none 19:01 34 22 12 262 (W) 583 cirrus none 20:01 34 23 12 274 (W) 999 cirrus none 21:01 36 24 22 291 (WNW) 503 cirrus none 22:01 34 24 7 293 (WNW) 431 cirrus none 23:01 33 25 16 296 (WNW) 507 cirrus none 00:01 33 25 14 310 (NW) 537 mstly clr none 01:01 34 26 16 311 (NW) 395 mstly clr none 02:01 34 27 17 319 (NW) 318 mstly clr none 03:01 36 28 16 337 (NNW) 204 mstly clr none 04:01 36 28 15 317 (NW) 196 cirrus none 05:01 35 28 10 318 (NW) 214 cirrus none 06:01 35 28 17 316 (NW) 217 cirrus 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: 2.55b5. Current guide software version: GIm Ctrlv3.0b27. Current TCC version is 2.2.2. -Russet McMillan