Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 07:11:50 -0600 (MDT) From: Jack Dembicky Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20050827 Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Saturday, Aug 27, 2005 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH -------------------------------------------------------------------- MKlaene J.Dembicky,R.McMillan NA2gdr 19:45 23:30 04:15 04:45 T.Murphy, E.Michelsen, APOLLO 04:45 06:15 E.Swanson, J.Barentine B.Barentine INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EN03/W 20:29 05:40 1.3 3.5 0 0 3.0 1.4 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: J.Dembicky A very impressive thunderstorm was off to our east this evening. Lots of lightning but far enough away that it didn't appear to be a threat and I opened the enclosure around 19:30 this evening to start cooling. There was quite a temp differential between the outside air and mirror/structure at the start of the night (even with the fans started at 19:00). Upon wathcing the numbers for a few minutes it appears that the telescope numbers are not updating. The temperature seemed to be dropping at sunset which was causing the humidity to climb. I got onto my large pointing model things were looking fine. About star 20 it couldn't find the first star, much better than last night, and Craig noticed (he was doing other things) that we had a 1s AZ controller timing error and it would mess up the model. So I fixed that and restarted the model again. The humidity had stabalized at about 80% but I wanted to get this large model done asap in case we ran APOLLO tonight. Russet noticed that the telescope weather wasn't updating correctly and said it may affect the focus and hence our pointing model. Craig told us the fix, and fixed it for us since he was online at the time. I finished the large pointing model and Russet helped with analysis of the results. We had a couple outliers (first data point I forgot to put the R+ND filter in place). We also took out another outlier point and used the new model. I wanted to get the Echelle pointing correction done next but we had a nasty rain/lightning storm approaching from our NW so I opted to close (I could see rain coming down from it when I went up to close). Hopefully I can get another 30 mins of clear sky tonight to finish up the last essential task of the night (echelle pointing) and then turn the telescope over to the APOLLO crew. I reopened the telescope around 04:10 in hopes of getting the remaining echelle pointing task completed while the APOLLO crew got set up for observations tonight. I couldn't find a star with the Echelle. I think the problem was the Y tilt was off by about 300" for some reason. The other numbers looked reasonable. I had issued a set inst=echelle twice and slewed after but it didn't seem to help. I was pointing at a 2.2 mag star and it was no where in the field. I did a random offset and was able to see some star (by chance) so I know the camera was getting photons. I was also having problems with the ecam not wanting to take exposures and/or reporting errors back to me in TUI. A couple I had not seen before. PR submitted and perhaps Fritz can look into it during the daytime. I didn't want to spend too much time on this since APOLLO could use the time and it wouldn't take me long to complete the task tommorow once things are checked and working. I will need about 15 mins to finish this tommorow (I can probably do it during twilight as well), that once I figure out if the Y tilt on the tertiary was the problem for the bad pointing. We then switched to APOLLO around 5AM and things went smoothly from our end. The APOLLO crew found some problems on theirs but we did sucessfully fire the laser at the moon around 5:45AM. Sucessfully as in we got the beam out of the telescope, they had other problems they were going to work on during the daytime. It was very valuable time for them and they did get a fair amount accomplished in only a little over an hour. ------- 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- 20:27 DISslit -50(1387) 18 76 15.7/- 134 14. none 2.2 20:28 NA2gdr 5375(28375) 9 77 15.5/- 142 16 R 1.1 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------ 18:01 70 52 11 185 (S) 336 Pt. Cldy none 19:01 67 50 8 212 (SSW) 356 Pt. Cldy none 20:01 61 51 14 142 (SE) 397 Pt. Cldy none 21:01 60 53 9 154 (SSE) 413 Mst. Clr none 22:01 61 51 9 168 (SSE) 414 Clear none 23:01 62 49 11 176 (S) 392 Pt. Cldy none 00:01 63 48 17 178 (S) 382 Cloudy rain 01:01 62 49 13 191 (S) 426 Cloudy rain 02:01 50 44 18 68 (ENE) 596 Cloudy lt. rain 03:01 59 48 9 212 (SSW) 321 Cloudy none 04:01 53 47 8 234 (SW) 352 Pt. Cldy none 05:01 58 49 7 231 (SW) 377 Mst. Clr none 06:01 56 49 4 224 (SW) 391 Mst. Clr 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 1.0