From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20031030 Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 06:22:09 -0700 (MST) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Thursday, October 30, 2003 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH -------------------------------------------------------------------- K.Covey K.Covey DIS 19:40 00:00 K.Covey N.Silvestri DIS 00:03 05:00 B.Gillespie R.McMillan SH 05:00 05:25 INST SCHEDULED WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/RO/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- UW04/R 18:09 05:00 0 1.5 0 0 6.9 2.4 0 0 0 EN01/O/D 05:00 05:25 0 0 0 0 0.4 0 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- 1st Half Observing Specialist: J.Barentine With soupy-looking skies around sunset, Kevin logged in a little early to take some dome-closed cals. Dust counts crept up after sunset; around 19:00 I turned off the intex and telex fans and put the press fans back on to lower the enclosure dust counts. Not much longer, the Sloanies informed they were open and I noted the skies clearing slowly. Dust backed off some, so I opened at 19:30. Skies were clear throughout the rest of the half, although the transparency took a hit due to the dust. El Paso seemed invisible on the horizon, indicating the amount of dust in the basin. Around 00:50 Nicole noted that she could not abort a DIS exposure through the DIS Expose window in TUI. She wrote: "I get an error that says 'abort failed - one expose command must be run' and the abort and stop buttons are greyed out so I can't press either of them." I killed the exposure by issuing a disabort in the MC and told her to try again. The next expose command worked, so I told her to carry on as before. 2nd half Observing Specialist: R.McMillan Special thanks to John for staying at work although I slept in and showed up late! Second half had persistent thin clouds and seeing ranging from poor to good. There was a crash of the guider Mac at around 02:20 which required rebooting but didn't cost any observing time. A little after that, I realized that the intex and telex fans were still off, causing an anomalously high focus. I turned the fans on and tracked the focus down 200 steps during the next hour. Again today, as yesterday, the observer ran out of targets that could be reached through cirrus, and she kindly allowed me to do some Shack-Hartmann measurements before setting her up for cals during twilight. When she decided to stop observing, she experienced another failure of the TUI abort button. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEGDFVO) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ----------------------------------------------------------------------- UW04 D I/S 00:50 00:54 DIS abort failed via TUI ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Air/Truss Wind Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp-C Dir MPH filt FWHM --------------------------------------------------------------------- 19:41 DISslit 150(810) 192 78 6.9/7.3 262 18 - 1.05 19:43 NA2gdr -65(43934) 194 78 7.0/7.3 263 22 R 0.98 21:17 dis-slit 200(874) 166 57 6.8/6.8 265 18 - 0.88 21:19 NA2gdr -535(43464) 167 57 6.6/6.8 264 14 R 0.85 -------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------ 16:01 47 21 20 268 (W) 1552 MstlyCldy none 17:01 46 19 22 257 (WSW) 1627 MstlyCldy none 18:01 46 19 26 259 (W) 1653 MstlyCldy none 19:01 45 20 17 267 (W) 1919 MstlyCldy none 20:01 45 21 24 268 (W) 1596 MstlyClr none 21:01 44 21 19 262 (W) 1425 MstlyClr none 22:01 44 22 18 264 (W) 1388 MstlyClr none 23:01 44 22 20 256 (WSW) 1398 MstlyClr none 00:01 43 23 17 251 (WSW) 1333 MstlyClr none 01:01 42 24 14 259 (W) 1417 PtlyCldy none 02:01 40 25 11 256 (WSW) 1427 PtlyCldy none 03:01 40 26 10 246 (WSW) 1351 cirrus none 04:01 40 27 8 265 (W) 1353 cirrus none 05:01 42 25 11 267 (W) 1151 cirrus none 06:01 42 20 17 258 (WSW) 585 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 Telescope drives operational. Current Remark version: 2.85b Current guide software version: guider v4.1b4 Current TCC version: 2.7.1 Current TUI version: TUI-0.75