Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 05:49:57 -0700 (MST) From: John Barentine Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20050312 Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Saturday, March 12, 2005 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- E.Turner J.Barentine SPIcam 19:00 21:05 Echelle 21:10 22:07 SPIcam 22:10 23:50 P.Yoachim P.Yoachim DIS 00:18 05:50 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/RO/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PU03/O 19:02 00:10 0 0 0 0 3.2 1.9 0 0 0 UW05/R 00:10 05:23 0 0 0 0 5.2 0 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: J.Barentine Tonight started out promising with light winds and good (subarcsecond) seeing in twilight. Then the seeing situation became a total trainwreck, with excursions over the course of several tens of seconds from one arcsecond to as many as five. It was bad enough that I only got a few of the lenses in PU03 under the required conditions for "good" data and paused repeatedly hoping to wait out the bad seeing moments. Around 21:00 it got so reliably bad that I temporarily gave up on lenses and ran a backup program to get MK standard stars with the Echelle; I got two before the seeing appeared to settle down, so I switched back to SPIcam. No sooner had I checked focus but the seeing blew up again. From then until giving up at 23:50 I got one additional lens. Around 20:30 we had a dust event; 1um counts outside crested barely above 2000/0.1 cu-ft. I turned the press fans on during the event and carried on. Second half was quiet, with the less frequent occasions of really bad seeing. Peter noticed an odd pattern noise in one of his images that stopped about 1/3 of the way along the columns in the image; it's in tycho:/export/images/keep/obj.004r.fits. Otherwise things were pretty well-behaved. Note in the focus numbers below what I found last night: telescope focus started out positive and moved negative fairly early on. On both occasions I had been ventilating for some time before the first focus measurement. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEGDFNVO) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Air/Truss Wind Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp-C Dir MPH filt FWHM --------------------------------------------------------------------- 18:47 SPIcam 100(1373) 118 83 6.9/8.3 268 18 r' 1.02 18:49 NA2gdr 3964(40964) 119 83 6.9/8.3 268 18 R 1.00 19:14 SPIcam -50(1248) 43 56 7.0/7.7 257 18 r' 0.86 19:14 NA2gdr -1745(35254)43 56 7.0/7.7 257 18 R 1.04 21:21 Echelle -15(222) 11 65 5.9/5.8 277 17 ND3 1.25 22:28 SPIcam 90(1235) -16 79 5.5/5.3 291 20 r' 1.21 22:31 NA2gdr -798(36201) -18 79 5.3/5.3 303 14 R 0.89 00:18 NA2gdr -1730(29270)186 80 4.4/4.5 313 21 R 1.03 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------ 16:01 53 20 18 263 (W) 591 Clear none 17:01 52 21 13 257 (WSW) 823 Clear none 18:01 48 11 14 253 (WSW) 453 Clear none 19:01 45 12 19 266 (W) 744 Clear none 20:01 44 14 17 247 (WSW) 1646 Clear none 21:01 42 14 19 273 (W) 1697 Clear none 22:01 42 13 15 289 (WNW) 1083 Clear none 23:01 41 16 18 305 (NW) 808 Clear none 00:01 41 17 17 324 (NW) 703 Clear none 01:01 40 19 12 345 (NNW) 564 Clear none 02:01 39 19 11 307 (NW) 547 PtlyCldy none 03:01 38 20 8 318 (NW) 539 PtlyCldy none 04:01 36 20 8 323 (NW) 485 Clear none 05:01 36 19 7 352 (N) 409 Clear 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 TCC version: 2.7.2 Current TUI version: TUI 0.94b2