Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 05:50:29 -0600 (MDT) From: Jack Dembicky Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20050626 Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Sunday, June 26, 2005 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH -------------------------------------------------------------------- M.Klaene J.Dembicky SPIcam 20:44 01:00 V.Dwarkadas D.York Echelle 01:00 05:37 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/RO/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EN01/O/D 21:19 01:00 0 0 0 0 3.0 0.7 0 0 0 UC07/R 01:00 04:53 0 0 0 3.3 0 0.6 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: J.Dembicky I opened the enclosure around 19:45. We had a few clouds overhead during twilight which made focusing a little more time consuming. We had an engineering pre-empt for the first half of the night as we needed to get a good pointing model for the telescope and tie up a couple of other loose ends. I got started onto an 80 point pointing model around 20:10 which took around an hour to complete. Russet came in during that time as well to help out. We then checked the pointing on the NA1 port and made the necessary adjustments. We then encountered some problems with running the Echelle slitviewer under Remark, due to recent computer changes. We also ran a Shack-Hartmann test on the telescope. This ran on until around midnight when we gave the APOLLO guys about 45 mins to do a quick check that they could find a star in their instrument/alignment eyepiece. We then turned the telescope over to the 2nd half program a few minutes short of 01:00. We quickly discovered another problem with the echelle images not being written out to disk (actually it had occured earlier but we were busy completing other tasks and hadn't noticed). This took another call to Craig and he had things working in about 30 mins. Once that was worked out I had the 2nd half observer start their cals, while I worked on another problem related to the recent computer changes. Cals were finished around 01:50 and I focused the Echelle and re-checked the pointing (looked good). Then the slitviewer started giving us some new problems. I was looking at the incoming images in IRAF and didn't see the problem, Don was looking at them with the Echelle Slitview (Remark) and his images were not updating, the files were being written correctly to disk though, so it wasn't a camera problem. It took a few minutes to figure out what was going on, and only after I tried taking an Echelle guider image did I see what was happening. The gcam doreads were comming thru the MC but there was some error occuring in the TCC that prevented Remark from knowing the exposures were finished and allowing it to read the new images. I restarted the slitviewer Mac but that didn't help, then I restarted of the TCC and that cleared the problem. Of course it only took a couple of minutes before the guider then crashed. So we finally got onto science about 03:20. At around 03:50 Don asked me to save a slitview image, so I went to save it to where I thought our data was going. When I rebooted the TCC I forgot we had did an imdir to a directory that Remark could write to, so Remark defaulted back to /export/images which it can't write to but never bothered to tell us this. So another 40 mins were wasted while I fixed it so Remark could write to a directory and took a test image to confirm it did. And of course as soon as I had Don back taking science the guider hung again! The guider hung again about 20 mins later. The 2nd half was plaugued with problems mostly related to the slitview camera. We squeeked a little science out of the night though. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEGDFNVO) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ----------------------------------------------------------------------- UC07 E I/S 02:20 03:20 various slitview problems ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Air/Truss Wind Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp-C Dir MPH filt FWHM --------------------------------------------------------------------- 20:59 SPIcam -25(1679) 75 58 16.3/17.7 142 22 r' 1.61 21:08 NA2gdr 701(29701) 73 60 16.2/17.3 144 23 R 1.47 23:35 S-H -325(1824) 337 76 15.3/15.6 142 24 none 1.5 01:59 Echelle -223(410) -9 58 14.9/14.5 158 20 ND2 1.24 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------ 18:01 70 43 15 190 (S) 686 Pt. Cldy none 19:01 69 42 14 193 (SSW) 642 Pt. Cldy none 20:01 64 44 14 146 (SE) 767 Pt. Cldy none 21:01 61 45 19 144 (SE) 781 Pt. Cldy none 22:01 61 45 18 141 (SE) 803 Mst. Clr none 23:01 60 45 24 149 (SSE) 824 Mst. Clr none 00:01 58 46 22 147 (SSE) 886 Pt. Cldy none 01:01 58 48 22 155 (SSE) 912 Pt. Cldy none 02:01 59 45 19 159 (SSE) 765 Pt. Cldy none 03:01 59 44 15 179 (S) 714 Pt. Cldy none 04:01 60 43 16 177 (S) 654 Pt. Cldy none 05:01 60 43 15 183 (S) 705 Pt. Cldy 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 0.94