From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20000803 Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 06:26:52 -0600 (MDT) APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY 3.5m Telescope Night Log Thursday, Aug 3rd, 2000 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT DATE START FINISH -------------------------------------------------------------------- J.Hayes D.Long DIS-low/1.5" 8/03 20:20 01:10 K.Krisciunas K.Krisciunas GrIm/SPIcam 8/04 01:10 05:21 INST SCHEDULED WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOTUSED I/RO/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B -------------------------------------------------------------------- NM09/O 20:58 01:10 0 0 0 0 2.3 1.9 0 0 0 UW07/R 01:10 05:21 1.0 - 0.5 - 2.7 - 0 0 - note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist, 1st Shift: Camron Hastings First half started with Dan Long finding a small fire while on a hike near APO. It was an old stump, buried, from the control burn, that had not died. We called Sunspot VFD and Robert Rentschler, Dan and I went out with a little water and some tools and extinguished it. We then opened the dome at 20:20 for cooling. All telescope systems working fine except for the "not full step" errors on the tertiary. John Briggs showed up to work on DIMM testing again. We had trouble getting DIMM to talk to the logging software. It seems that the FTP server was choked, I restarted the laptop and FTP server and it seemed to run normally. Observing Specialist, 2nd Shift: Russet McMillan The remainder of the DIS observing went well, with just a few clouds starting to appear in the north near the changeover period. Those clouds thickened quickly and caused the telescope to be closed from 02:15 until 03:15, when they started to fade away. When GRIM was mounted, we discovered that an electronics problem was messing up all the images. The most recent GRIM image I could find on disk, from July 27, was also rather strange, although a previous test image from July 24 seemed normal. I tried restarting the hardware and software without effect. Because of this and the clouds, I recommended switching to SPIcam. The difficulties and extra instrument change cost about half an hour, and after that there wasn't time to get much data before we had to close. While the telescope was closed, I power cycled the GRIM hardware several more times according to Craig's recommendations. After the third try, I got almost normal-looking images. Given another hour to settle down, GRIM was producing consistent images on most attempts. Once the clouds cleared off, we switched back from SPIcam to GRIM and the instrument seemed to behave well. Remark comments: While restarting Remark, I accidentally put a carriage return in the name field. I tried several times to clear it and found this is still very difficult to do. However, when I tried to connect, the new version of Remark recognized the error and cleared the field for me. Although still somewhat confusing, this is a big improvement. Remark also had some difficulty when I was working on the GRIM problems; it kept displaying an error message about an ack timeout, even though GRIM was behaving normally and producing reasonable images. This error message wouldn't clear until I changed modes during observing. ****** OBSERVER COMMENTS ****** --------------- INSTRUMENT FOCUS LOG ----------------- REMARK Air/Truss Wind Time Instrument Focus Az El #Temp-C Dir MPH filt FWHM" --------------------------------------------------------------------- 20:50 DIS-Slit 150(1447) 001 62 17.5/18.8 086 11 none 1.15" 20:57 NA2 Gdr 1507(1447) 002 62 17.5/18.7 103 12 none 1.18" 01:50 SPIcam 0(1127) 164 56 15.6/15.6 106 12 V 1.35 04:5 GRIM(f/5) -25(1290) 135 49 15.1/15.2 97 8 H 0.99 ------------- WEATHER CONDITIONS ------------ Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------ 16:01 74 36 1 183 (S) 648 ptly cldy none 17:01 71 32 2 74 (ENE) 587 ptly cldy none 18:01 70 32 5 79 (ENE) 627 clear none 19:01 68 31 10 83 (E) 856 clear none 20:01 65 32 13 84 (E) 653 clear none 21:01 63 30 13 87 (E) 672 clear none 22:01 62 33 13 106 (ESE) 911 clear none 23:01 61 35 13 94 (E) 1017 clear none 00:01 61 37 17 111 (ESE) 1189 mstly clr none 01:01 60 36 10 108 (ESE) 1262 ptly cldy none 02:01 61 37 11 112 (ESE) 1258 mstly cldy none 03:01 60 38 10 108 (ESE) 1325 ptly cldy none 04:01 60 38 6 82 (E) 1279 ptly cldy none 05:01 60 37 6 105 (ESE) 1325 ptly cldy none 06:01 59 40 8 111 (ESE) 1383 ptly cldy 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: 2.62.Current guide software version: GIm Ctrlv3.0b27. Current TCC version is 2.4.0b1 Current MC version: v1_7_3. -- Camron Hastings, Russet McMillan