From mcmillan@apo.nmsu.edu Fri Sep 15 22:49:53 2000 Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 05:42:12 -0600 (MDT) From: Russet McMillan To: obs-report@apo.nmsu.edu Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20000805 APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY 3.5m Telescope Night Log Saturday, Aug 5th, 2000 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT DATE START FINISH -------------------------------------------------------------------- D.Bowen R.Kim DIS-High 8/05 21:10 22:35 B.Gillespie R.McMillan S-H 8/06 01:50 02:50 S.Hameed S.Hameed SPIcam 8/06 02:50 04:50 INST SCHEDULED WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOTUSED I/RO/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B -------------------------------------------------------------------- PU02/R 20:56 01:10 1.2 1.4 0 0.2 0 1.4 0 0 0 NM10/R 01:10 01:50 0.7 - 0 - 0 - 0 0 - EN01/O/D 01:50 02:50 0 - 0 - 1.0 - 0 0 - NM10/R 02:50 05:22 0.5 - 0 - 2.0 - 0 0 - note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: Russet McMillan The night started out partly cloudy, with the satellite showing us right at the center of a swirling low-pressure system. The dome was opened late at 21:10 because of clouds, and closed at 22:35 when precipitation came close on radar. While the dome was open, 50-miles-distant lightning was illuminating the telescope and looking very impressive on the low-light video camera. During checkout, I had trouble with a few large rotator runaways in the clockwise direction. I re-measured the VEL.SCALE.OUT and made a small change to the value in the INIT file. After that I didn't see any rotator trouble. * A mistake that I made while starting up the guider managed to hang up the TCC, making it necessary to restart three layers of software and costing about 10 minutes. During first-half observing, DIS behaved well and the pointing was quite good. As usual, the guider didn't deal well with patchy clouds. When the guide star was lost, the centroiding program would pick something else to center on, resulting in occasional wild offsets. Eventually, I had to turn guiding off, which was a shame, since I was also using the guide star flux to monitor the clouds on a shorter timescale than the slitviewer or cloud camera. * I did some test slews while we were closed and found that the local Remark (version 2.62) did not show a slew countdown for slews generated either locally or remotely. I've been noticing this problem off and on during the past week, but it wasn't consistent. It's possible that some of those times the local Remark was 2.55b5, because tonight I found the problem to be quite consistent. The top window always said "Move will take 0 seconds," which was untrue. When I tried starting up Remark 2.55b5 on the Obs2Mac, it showed correct countdowns ("Move will take 27 seconds") for moves requested by 2.62 which did not show a countdown. The same held true for rotate commands; whether the rotate was requested from Remark 2.62, Remark 2.55b5, or the TCC, the 2.62 window always said "Rotate will take 0 seconds," while the 2.55b5 window gave a correct countdown. I think this shows that the problem is in the new version of Remark, rather than the TCC or MC. After a few sprinkles of rain around 01:15, the skies cleared and we were able to re-open at 01:50. The scheduled SPIcam program was unable to take advantage of grossly non-photometric weather, so while it remained partly cloudy I took nearly an hour of Shack-Hartmann data. In the process of trying an altitude sweep, I discovered that * the PMSS was showing oscillations at altitudes above 80 degrees. I had just switched desiccant canisters when one of them was found to be saturated. I spent a while trying to characterize the oscillation problem, so I only got the upper portions of the altitude sweep with the S-H. Collimation looked all right to my eye, although there may have been a slight change since last weekend. At 02:50 the weather was clear enough for NM10 to try getting some data, so I turned the telescope over. SPIcam got good seeing with narrowband filters; the guider measurements were worse by 0.5 arcsec. Everything went smoothly until some more clouds arrived and we closed at 04:50. ****** OBSERVER COMMENTS ****** S.Hameed (NM10): The night wasn't great. We were lucky to be open, but the sky conditions were either non-photometric or opaque due to clouds. The seeing started off at 0.8 arcsec but got worse (1.4") pretty quickly. A banding structure was visible in some of the SPIcam images. --------------- INSTRUMENT FOCUS LOG ----------------- Air/Truss Wind Time Instrument Focus Az El #Temp-C Dir MPH filt FWHM" --------------------------------------------------------------------- 21:15 DISslit -50(1264) -22 60 16.8/18.5 125 15 -- 1.02 02:00 S-H -25(1726) -1 63 15.0/15.5 80 10 -- ?? 03:05 SPIcam 25(1123) -95 70 16.6/15.7 270 3 645 0.78 ------------- WEATHER CONDITIONS ------------ Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------ 17:01 65 46 0 263 (W) 889 ptly cldy none 18:01 66 46 2 188 (S) 908 ptly cldy none 19:01 65 46 0 223 (SW) 891 ptly cldy none 20:01 64 44 5 165 (SSE) 961 ptly cldy none 21:01 63 36 12 127 (SE) 927 ptly cldy none 22:01 63 35 15 129 (SE) 1032 ptly cldy none 23:01 63 38 11 175 (S) 945 cloudy none 00:01 60 42 1 24 (NNE) 1253 cloudy none 01:01 59 41 5 335 (NNW) 1048 cloudy rain 02:01 59 37 8 80 (E) 1151 ptly cldy none 03:01 62 34 0 201 (SSW) 955 ptly cldy none 04:01 59 37 4 0 (N) 1047 ptly cldy none 05:01 61 39 8 17 (NNE) 969 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. -- Russet McMillan