From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20020830 Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 06:37:23 -0600 (MDT) APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY 3.5m Telescope Night Log Friday, August 30, 2002 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- Gillespie J.Morgan,R.McMillan, Echslit,NA2gdr, 00:10 00:40 W.Ketzeback S-H,DIS-slit,DIS 02:15 06:15 INST SCHEDULED WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOTUSED I/RO/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B -------------------------------------------------------------------- EN01/O 20:26 05:42 3.6 1.7 0 0 0 4.0 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: R.McMillan,W.Ketzeback Thick clouds and some rain kept us closed during first half, so most of that time was spent in extra checkout and training for the new observing specialist. Yesterday's rotator troubles had been improved by work during the day, although it still showed some indication of inconsistency at slew speed. The NA2 guider is still running warm and is unusable for exposures longer than about 5 seconds (good enough for engineering, but not for guiding during science). It will be sent away for repairs next week. Jeff Morgan arrived and we reviewed some of the collimation and other issues from yesterday. Around midnight, the clouds parted enough for us to open, but there was still some threatening weather not far away. We opened for half an hour with myself working in the dome and Bill in the control room to get a few unfocused donut images with the echelle slitviewer, then closed again as more clouds approached. The defocused images looked quite nice, fairly well collimated although no changes have been made since the telescope went on-sky. The weather threats did not materialize, and after 02:00 we opened under cirrus thin enough to attempt a Shack-Hartmann measurement. The very first image showed something strange at the edge of the mirror, and we realized that the new cat-eye mask has not yet been installed. Jeff said he would be able to reduce the data while excluding the edge effects, so we struggled to get reasonable images through varying clouds. While Jeff reduced the Shack-Hartmann data, Bill and I wrestled more clouds to obtain a proper DIS slitviewer instrument block (there was an error in the one taken at dawn yesterday). Although we didn't have a chance to test the results fully before moving on to the next task, the fit looked very good, and the new instrument block has been moved into I_NA2_DIS.DAT to make it the default for the instrument. For observers, this should mean that offsets in X will be more consistently parallel with the slit direction, which has been an occasional problem in the past. We took some more S-H data for Jeff, still struggling with clouds, changing temperature and focus, and degraded seeing. Eventually we had enough data to make a small change to the secondary collimation and confirm that it made an improvement (FWHM of 0.28 arcsec). That brought us into morning twilight. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE TIME S/E/G/D/O TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Air/Truss Wind Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp-C Dir MPH filt FWHM --------------------------------------------------------------------- 02:53 S-H 50(1579) 77 63 15.2/15.2 340 4 - good 03:23 DISslit 100(888) 77 54 13.4/14.8 232 7 - 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: 2.82 Current guide software version: GIm Ctrlv4.1b2 Current TCC version: 2.6.5