From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20050803 Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 05:55:06 -0600 (MDT) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Wednesday, August 3 2005 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH -------------------------------------------------------------------- M.Klaene J.Dembicky,R.McMillan SPIcam 20:00 05:45 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/RO/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EN01/W 20:59 05:20 0.3 0 0 0 8.0 0 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- 1st Half Observing Specialist: J.Dembicky Problems found/fixed - NA2 guider does not like exposure of 0.01 sec taken via tcc command line. Problem went away later in the evening so I couldn't show Craig what I got spat back at me from the tcc. - Something messed up my TUI path for the NA2 Guider camera images (ie. won't display but does take image and places in /export/images/gcam/UTxxxxx). Images are not being written to my local machine. Other guider (NA1) worked fine. Craig fixed this. - First echelle exposure looked like it had more background noise than I remembered. I took a second image to see if the problem persisted. There seemed to be the same noise in the 2nd image also. Could be a IRAF scaling problem, but I never noticed it before. I showed the images to Russet and she wasn't too concerned. - NA2 guider does not work from TUI. Exposure seems to be taken but TUI never knows it is finished to bring the exposure button back. I tried several exposures/times ranging from 0.1s to 10s. No dice with any. My guess is this is also part of the problem with the NA2 exposure not being displayed and/or written to my local machine. Craig fixed from above problem. - Heard a clickty clack at certain positions (where the phone was located) on int. level. Craig and Jon investigated. We actually heard 2 different noises. One was the idle wheel on the building, the other was the toolbox on the workbench. - SPIcam didn't like taking the first exposure (on sky, 3 prior test exposures worked fine). A couple ctrl-C and the camera finally ready out. SPIcam apparently did not connect to the hub correctly - Pointing was pretty good, collimation was off but Russet thought it may be due to the telescope not being at equilibrium yet. She would check it when she came in later. Accomplished a checkout of SPIcam, Echelle, NA2 guider, NA1 guider, DIS slitviewer. Also a Guider instrument block (Russet came in and helped on this as there were a couple major errors in the documentation from recent changes on the telescope. The documentation will be fixed tomorrow to reflect the changes now that I am aware of them). 2nd Half Observing Specialist: R.McMillan During second half, the sky was clear until about 03:30, with moderate seeing. Humidity and dust rose for a bit after midnight, with dust just getting over the limit, but then both dropped. I took another echelle bias just to be sure, and the noise levels were perfectly comparable with past images, so I'm sure the instrument is all right. Collimation was confirmed to be pretty poor still at midnight, with the primary getting close to the air temperature. My guess is that the effect is probably due to warping of the top end while it was off the telescope, and if it follows its habits, it should pop again in a few days. After some discussion, Jon Davis did not want to adjust the primary for the collimation, but he did run the telescope down and up a few times to make sure the primary was relaxed. Images after that were substantially the same. I took some unfocused donut images at the center and corners of SPIcam to look for any possible obstruction from the APOLLO corner cube. No obstruction was apparent, but there was some scattering from the cube, apparent in all parts of the SPIcam field. When I switched to the Shack-Hartmann for collimation correction, I found that the secondary was not doing its semi-closed-loop position corrections. I had to play with it for a while before I figured out that NCORR was set to 0, so it didn't matter what the value of MAXCORR was. Once I set NCORR to 1, the secondary moved much closer to its desired position. Before the fix, the secondary tilts were not off by enough to account for the very poor collimation, though. I had considerable trouble finding a star with the Shack-Hartmann and eventually had to change the tertiary tilts by 1000 arcsec. This seemed odd, since pointing at NA2 was not too bad when we started out; I even tried centering a high-altitude star on SPIcam and rotating the tertiary while tracking, but that didn't help. In the Shack-Hartmann images (necessarily taken at field center), the APOLLO corner cube was just barely starting to vignette the mirror. Of course, the adjustments to secondary tilt allowed me to undo most of that big change to the tertiary. Collimation was off enough that the first SH images were difficult to reduce, but I managed by doing several iterations, resulting in a total change in secondary tilt of about 150 arcsec. Next I switched back to SPIcam to redo the donut-check with proper collimation. The diffraction from the corner cube was still visible in donuts, but not in focused images (it was aligned with a secondary-support diffraction spike anyway). I took a pointing model next; it had a large offset due to the change in collimation, but all the other parameters looked fairly normal. I followed up with a SPIcam instrument block, made difficult when I had to wait for clouds to pass off. At the end of the instrument block, I captured and documented a rare species of software bug to add to our collection. Still remaining to be done: DIS instrument block, echelle pointing check, re-collimate after the inevitable pop and re-adjust pointing. ------- 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- 22:13 SPIcam 325(1609) 49 72 14.4/15.3 109 16 r' 1.1 22:14 NA2gdr 723(29723) 50 72 14.3/15.3 111 16 R 1.1 01:02 SPIcam 75(1293) 249 62 12.7/13.3 110 15 r 1.35 01:59 S-H -125(1625) 333 64 13.1/13.0 95 9 - okay ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------ 18:01 65 41 6 175 (S) 1144 Pt. Cldy none 19:01 65 41 6 179 (S) 995 Pt. Cldy none 20:01 62 40 10 125 (SE) 1101 Pt. Cldy none 21:01 60 40 14 114 (ESE) 1415 Mst. Clr none 22:01 58 40 13 104 (ESE) 1750 Clear none 23:01 57 44 14 105 (ESE) 2238 Clear none 00:01 56 46 13 95 (E) 2637 Clear none 01:01 55 47 15 116 (ESE) 2717 clear none 02:01 56 46 8 92 (E) 2606 clear none 03:01 56 45 8 93 (E) 2518 clear none 04:01 57 43 5 90 (E) 2347 ptly cldy none 05:01 57 42 8 85 (E) 2308 ptly 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: 2.7.3 Current TUI version: TUI 1.0b2