From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20000218 Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2000 06:30:35 -0700 (MST) FRIDAY FEBRUARY 18, 2000 APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY OBSERVING LOG ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT DATE START FINISH York -- -- -- -- Rodgers Rodgers, Law Echelle 2/18 18:45 00:08 Kent Annis GRIM 2/19 00:12 05:49 INST SCHEDULED WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOTUSED I/RS/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B UC11/R 17:45 18:45 - - - - - - 1.0 - - UW04/R 18:45 00:10 - 0 - 0 - 5.4 0 - 0 UC08/R 00:10 05:49 - 0 - 0 - 5.7 0 - 0 (note: times listed include instrument change time) ACTIVITY LOG (* means a trouble report has been issued or appended to) Observing Specialist: McMillan Weather was partly cloudy to cirrusy for most of the night, with the telescope (both echelle and GRIM) generally getting better or much better seeing than DIMM. The telescope was not opened until mid-twilight because of the clouds and some instrument trouble during checkout. The observer for Adler was unable to login for observations due to inclement weather in the Chicago area. We had trouble with the echelle during checkout, a repeat of the behavior described in PR 1999142. By turning on and off the fiber control boxes in Connie's prescribed order and muttering magical incantations over the ICC, we got it working before the end of twilight. There was no spare time for any of the diagnostic procedures Connie had suggested. The echelle functioned normally during observation, but the pointing was notably poor, with offsets greater than 10 arcseconds usually required to center the star. We did not try a pointing correction at the time. Pointing during second half with GRIM was fine (aside from a slight confusion about unit conversion), and pointing corrections were successful. We saw some hints of the focus instability with GRIM at f/10, but nothing egregious enough to point at. Astigmatism seemed quite bad for even slightly out-of-focus images with both the echelle and GRIM. I took one out-of-focus donut image with the echelle slitviewer (at altitude 42 degrees), showing what appeared to be poor collimation, and saved it in /export/images/guider/collim0218.fits for reference. OBSERVER COMMENTS FOCUS LOG FEBRUARY 18 2000 Wind Time Inst Focus Az El #Temp Dir MPH filt FWHM " 19:05 Echelle 170(-466) 177 53 0.8/2.2 292 7 clear 0.75 21:40 Echelle 250(-375) 220 42 1.0/1.1 258 7 ND1 1.36 00:25 GRIM(f/5) 125(428) 197 57 1.7/1.1 269 14 Kshort 0.77 00:45 GRIM(f/10) 150(465) 206 55 1.9/1.1 290 16 Kshort 0.98 #First temp is air, second temp is telescope. WEATHER FEBRUARY 18 2000 Wind Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Precip. 17:01 37 -1 9 339 (NNW) 158 ptly cldy none 18:01 35 0 5 271 (W) 186 ptly cldy none 19:01 34 0 5 292 (WNW) 223 cirrus none 20:01 34 2 2 327 (NNW) 315 cirrus none 21:01 36 4 7 270 (W) 334 cirrus none 22:01 35 2 9 267 (W) 394 cirrus none 23:01 34 4 6 260 (W) 463 cirrus none 00:01 35 4 7 292 (WNW) 404 cirrus none 01:01 36 9 10 284 (WNW) 453 mstly clr none 02:01 37 10 9 261 (W) 493 ptly cldy none 03:01 37 10 16 278 (W) 416 mstly clr none 04:01 37 9 13 294 (WNW) 466 mstly clr none 05:01 37 8 17 286 (WNW) 534 mstly clr 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