Date: Wed, 19 May 2004 06:56:19 -0600 (MDT) From: John Barentine Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20040518 Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Tuesday, May 18, 2004 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH -------------------------------------------------------------------- B.Woodgate E.Wassell, C.Grady GFP 20:30 05:45 INST SCHEDULED WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/RO/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- DD01/O 20:58 05:01 0 0 0.9 0 7.2 0 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: J.Barentine Opened to cool at 18:15, again under light to moderate cirrus. Clouds were relatively thick in the early part of the evening. It was another exciting GFP night. Toward 1am Ed noticed that the wavecals he was taking didn't look right, as though a lamp either wasn't being commanded on properly or burnt out. Checking the low-light video monitor showed that the lamp was functional, but we saw some stray light indicating some kind of a leak. It turned out, on inspection in the dome, that the slider for the integrating sphere had fallen out due to the orientation of the instrument in rotation and having been at that position for some time. Ed put the slider back in place and we did not experience the problem again. At 02:45, Carol was preparing the next exposure in the sequence, and entered a comment command which included a comma; very soon thereafter the status window in the VNC viewer disappeared. We tried killing and restarting aiscontrol and the vncserver in succession but did not fix the problem; eventually we couldn't bring up the VNC server at all. A call to Craig led to the suggestion, after he killed the server, that we wait 3-5 minutes, startaiscamserver, and proceed. This allowed us to bring up the VNC window again, which showed only the xterm in the lower half; left-clicking on the desktop to get the menu to bring up the status window still did not work. A call to Povilas revealed some additional information, but he could not determine whether the comma was indeed to blame. Carol got the next science exposure going while they worked at getting the status window back. Povilas worked some unspecified magic to bring up the window. The NA2 guider gave us problems as well throughout the night. Early on, I found that exposures shorter than 3 seconds returned images that had most pixels assigned to zero with the exception of hot pixels and those pixels that had actually seen light during the exposure; i.e., it was as if the bias dropped to zero with abrupt transitions from zero to "real" values. It appeared to be a rather abrupt shift without much of a ramp in terms of changing the exposure time. Later in the night, around 00:00, it happened again, this time on 5 second exposures. I restarted the guider Mac and the camera controller which seemed to fix the problem. Around 03:15, the guider Mac abruptly crashed. Guiding just stopped with error "read timed out on port LTA7" in the TCC. Suspecting the Mac, I found it powered down. Brought it back up, reset the controller on the IL, and attempted guiding again. This time it seemed to take. The saving grace this evening was steady seeing, at about 1+/-0.2 arcsec FWHM in R, throughout most of the night except at the very beginning. At 04:20, we got the following error message in AISCAM: couldn't read /home/aiscam/status/aiscam_status, initialising... couldn't write /home/aiscam/status/aiscam_status The times of these messages coincided with the last update of the status window we had (around 04:15). The software could not read the status file and simply refused to update the displayed information, including TCC-related information like telescope position and time. Stayed open late for cals once again. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEGDFVO) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ----------------------------------------------------------------------- DD01 G I/S 02:45 03:30 aiscam software failure DD01 G T/H 03:15 03:25 NA2 guider Mac crashed ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Air/Truss Wind Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp-C Dir MPH filt FWHM --------------------------------------------------------------------- 21:07 gfp -150(1534) 102 77 15.0/16.5 191 6 I 0.77 21:21 NA2gdr -4795(46204)110 79 15.1/16.4 185 8 R 0.88 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------ 16:01 69 24 17 251 (WSW) 872 PtlyCldy none 17:01 72 25 27 235 (SW) 811 PtlyCldy none 17:01 72 25 27 235 (SW) 811 PtlyCldy none 18:01 68 22 12 225 (SW) 679 PtlyCldy none 19:01 63 20 9 243 (WSW) 720 PtlyCldy none 20:01 60 21 9 236 (SW) 849 PtlyCldy none 21:01 58 21 9 209 (SSW) 1043 PtlyCldy none 22:01 60 21 10 208 (SSW) 1021 PtlyCldy none 23:01 60 21 5 219 (SW) 1096 MstlyClr none 00:01 61 21 7 237 (WSW) 1091 MstlyClr none 01:01 61 21 5 257 (WSW) 1148 MstlyClr none 02:01 60 20 8 275 (W) 1111 MstlyClr none 03:01 60 20 5 256 (WSW) 1207 MstlyClr none 04:01 60 20 7 224 (SW) 1127 MstlyClr none 05:01 59 20 8 182 (S) 1142 MstlyClr 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: 2.7.2 Current TUI version: TUI-0.843