From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20010206 Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 06:36:15 -0700 (MST) APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY 3.5m Telescope Night Log Tuesday, February 6th, 2001 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH -------------------------------------------------------------------- B.Gillespie J.Dembicky, R.McMillan SPIcam 18:05 06:00 INST SCHEDULED WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOTUSED I/RO/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B -------------------------------------------------------------------- EN01/O 18:36 05:59 0 0 0 0 0 11.4 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist, 1st Shift: Jack Dembicky Started cooling of the enclosure at 16:00. Delayed opening a little since Craig was still checking out some of the computer system upgrades performed today. Opened enclosure at 17:45. Checked collimation (looked fine). Homed the tertiary axially and rotationally Did a pointing model for NA2 (under clouds). Performed a "Dry Run" GRB alert. Observing Specialist, 2nd Shift: Russet McMillan My notes on first half: we found a bug with the new TCC version, which was quickly fixed by Russ Owen. The gmonitor still has a problem reading the guider output, but the guiding actually works fine. We also managed to confirm that the guider is now much more robust when it loses a guide star behind clouds. The pointing was horrible at first (off by about 2 arcminutes), and we discovered that the tertiary was not where it was supposed to be, with each axial actuator off by up to a million steps. Jack and I homed the tertiary, and pointing was much better after that. The pointing model went well aside from the clouds, and the RMS error was about 3 arcseconds. The GRB dry run was also very successful; everything worked as expected, and the new echelle software seemed fine (although we weren't actually trying to break it). During second half, the clouds improved a lot but didn't go away entirely. I did some tests on repeatability of tertiary rotation, which seemed rather inconclusive. I got better results from a check of pointing at NA1, and used those to make an adjustment to the default tertiary tilts for the echelle. I got some interesting results from some tracking tests, but a problem with the fitting program late in the morning kept me from obtaining an echelle instrument block. --------------- INSTRUMENT FOCUS LOG ---------------- Air/Truss Wind Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp-C Dir MPH filt FWHM" --------------------------------------------------------------------- 18:15 SPIcam -50(908) 103 60 4.5/7.4 239 21 r' 1.09" 18:20 NA2gdr 1616(61616) 105 62 4.7/7.2 233 16 none 1.29" ------------- WEATHER CONDITIONS ------------ Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------ 16:01 45 21 13 232 (SW) 369 Cirrus none 17:01 43 20 20 234 (SW) 309 Cirrus none 18:01 40 19 20 234 (SW) 261 Cirrus none 19:01 41 16 19 235 (SW) 330 Cirrus none 20:01 43 13 16 198 (SSW) 332 Clouds none 21:01 42 9 18 232 (SW) 444 Clouds none 22:01 42 11 13 258 (WSW) 413 Clouds none 23:01 41 12 18 255 (WSW) 412 Clouds none 00:01 40 14 17 222 (SW) 436 ptly cldy none 01:01 39 16 19 216 (SW) 483 mstly clr none 02:01 38 17 18 248 (WSW) 391 cirrus none 03:01 36 18 17 227 (SW) 298 cirrus none 04:01 36 18 22 221 (SW) 267 cirrus none 05:01 36 18 20 201 (SSW) 243 mstly clr none 06:01 34 21 29 201 (SSW) 313 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 > 1u per 0.1 cubic feet. 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 2.4.1 Current MC version: v1_7_3.