From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20000610 Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 05:56:13 -0600 (MDT) SATURDAY JUNE 10 2000 APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY OBSERVING LOG ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT DATE START FINISH Golimowski Golimowski DIS-L,1.5 6/10 20:00 00:58 York York Echelle 6/11 01:03 04:51 INST SCHEDULED WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOTUSED I/RS/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B JH04/S 21:15 01:00 - 0 - 0 - 3.8 0 - 0 UC05/R 01:00 04:51 0 0 0.2 0 1.8 1.8 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 night was clear with very good to moderate seeing. During first half, while the NA2 guider was in use, it was getting 0.8-1.1 arcseconds while DIMM showed 1.5-2.5 arcsec. The telescope and instruments behaved perfectly during first half. The only difficulty was rediscovering that a offsetting a faint target along the slit is generally unsuccessful without a reference star to check position -- the target can be invisible on the slitviewer without actually getting any light to the spectrographs. We started to have a few more problems during second half. As it has been lately, pointing with the echelle was poor, usually coming up with the star 15 arcseconds or more from the slit. The stars always appeared on the same part of the slitviewer, which seems to confirm the suspicion that the pointing trouble is related to tertiary tip/tilts; however, the number of targets was small, and they were all in the same part of the sky, so it wasn't a very thorough test. * On one occasion, a sudden image jump of about 10 arcsec occurred in the absence of wind; the behavior looked typical of PMSS oscillation to me. However, I was unable to connect to the computer that monitors the PMSS for confirmation, and no beads were visible in the inspection windows of the desiccant canisters, so I couldn't tell if humidity was the cause. In addition to this gross image motion, the observer reported some inconsistency of motion when he made small offsets for guiding purposes; I thought this might be due to secondary autocollimation moves made concurrently with the offsets, but I was reluctant to turn off autocollimation completely because I might not remember to restart it when slewing. The slitviewer control software again proved itself very sensitive to abuse, causing first a slowdown and then a complete hangup of the MC when local and remote commands collided. After encountering a number of strange symptoms, I restarted the MC and the trouble subsided. Altogether, the hangups cost about 10 minutes of time. OBSERVER COMMENTS FOCUS LOG Time Instrument Focus Az El #Temp Dir MPH filt FWHM " 20:45 DISslit 50(839) 187 79 14.6/16.4 217 9 -- 0.86 20:50 Guider -225(839) 187 79 14.6/16.4 217 9 -- 0.87 01:05 Echelle 191(91) 152 37 13.7/13.6 275 11 ND2 1.37 #First temp is air, second temp is telescope. WEATHER Wind Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Precip. 17:01 63 33 11 205 (SSW) 1002 ptly cldy none 18:01 67 34 9 217 (SW) 936 mstly clr none 19:01 63 34 11 229 (SW) 917 mstly clr none 20:01 60 34 10 212 (SSW) 958 clear none 21:01 58 33 6 192 (SSW) 1186 clear none 22:01 57 33 10 212 (SSW) 1230 clear none 23:01 58 30 8 246 (WSW) 1151 clear none 00:01 58 28 7 270 (W) 1109 clear none 01:01 58 28 10 272 (W) 1082 clear none 02:01 57 27 5 268 (W) 992 clear none 03:01 57 26 7 285 (WNW) 995 clear none 04:01 56 27 8 342 (NNW) 979 clear none 05:01 57 26 4 297 (WNW) 898 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: 2.55b5. Current guide software version: GIm Ctrlv3.0b27. Current TCC version: 2.2.9. Current MC version: 1.7.2. - Russet McMillan