From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20050917 Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 03:02:12 -0600 (MDT) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Saturday, September 17, 2005 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH -------------------------------------------------------------------- M.Klaene R.McMillan SH,NA2Gdr,DIS 19:45 02:55 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 20:00 05:55 0 3.0 0 0 0.0 6.9 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: R. McMillan A thunderstorm in our radar blind spot prevented me from cooling before sunset; I opened the dome shortly after sunset. During test slews, the azimuth dataq was extremely spiky during the full-speed portion of the move. I wasn't sure how normal that is for the current state of things, but it looked unhappy to me. At 20:00, I started some tests of the tertiary in closed-loop mode; I truncated these slightly because I didn't want to spend too much usable night time on them, but in the meantime the telescope and Shack-Hartmann were cooling. Once satisfied that the closed-loop behavior was reasonable, I left the tertiary with NCORR=1. Next I took some Shack-Hartmann data and found that collimation was fine although Bill had thought it might be way off. I did two stars in different parts of the sky to be sure. Seeing was quite nice, and I was satisfied the measurements were good, so I didn't adjust collimation. I moved to a position high in the southeast (rapid azimuth tracking) to adjust the azimuth drive tuning parameters. I saw some oscillations, most of them apparently started by wind but just not damping as fast as desirable. So I played with the parameters a little and settled on some minor changes that seemed to damp out oscillations a little better, whether forced by wind or a small uncomputed offset. I later found that these new numbers also looked much less spiky on the dataq during slews, so I hope that's a good thing as well. AZIMUTH Old New 0.04 MC.POS.ERR.SCALE F! 0.06 0.09 MC.PE.RATE.SCALE F! 0.05 When I switched instruments to SPIcam in preparation for a pointing model, the not-a-full-step error reappeared for tertiary actuator C. We haven't seen that in a while, and it was pretty frustrating to have it come back again. It isn't a serious problem, but a nuisance because of the number of error messages it generates. I tried the GOFS trick once, but the error came right back. I next had trouble working with the NA2 guider. There was a bewildering array of error messages that seemed to indicate different things (timeouts, incomplete replies, exposure already in progress?), and I was having no luck using the regular fixes. Then I found out that the echelle slitviewer was also having strange problems, so I called for help. Fritz tracked down an arcane prescription in Craig's reply to PR #243, and the incantation "hub startNubs tcc2gcam tcc2ecam" fixed the problem. That took nearly an hour to figure out, but at last I got going on the pointing model with closed-loop correction on the tertiary. That went smoothly enough. After the pointing model, I checked pointing for NA1, which was fine. The slitviewer began to give strange messages again ("unexpected response (not 3 lines)," followed by timeouts), so I had to restart the ecam nub again. Next I switched to DIS and checked focus for the slit against the two cameras under very good, stable seeing conditions. The blue camera was in precise agreement with the slitviewer, but the red camera wanted the telescope focus to be higher. The instrument's red camera focus should be adjusted to fix this; in the meantime, observing specialists should be sure to err a little on the positive side with focus for DIS. Since we had persistent cirrus, throughput measurements were not possible. I did some pickup science which also served as tracking tests (tracking was excellent on the two targets I got). When the cirrus got thick enough to make science difficult, I decided to go home and get back to work on my own personal project: recovery from food poisoning. ------- 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- 01:13 DISslit 15(1152) -33 60 15.5/14.9 257 11 - 0.87 01:28 DIS(red) 50(1192) -36 58 15.5/14.9 241 11 - 0.89 01:31 DIS(blue) 15(1164) -36 57 15.4/14.9 252 11 - 0.97 01:38 NA2gdr 4709(27709) -37 57 15.6/14.8 256 14 R 0.68 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------ 16:01 71 48 18 208 (SSW) ptly cldy none 17:01 69 46 10 254 (WSW) ptly cldy none 18:01 67 45 13 243 (WSW) ptly cldy none 19:01 63 43 10 258 (WSW) ptly cldy none 20:01 61 41 8 265 (W) ptly cldy none 21:01 62 41 15 220 (SW) cirrus none 22:01 61 42 11 244 (WSW) mstly clr none 23:01 59 46 16 184 (S) clear none 00:01 60 45 14 195 (SSW) cirrus none 01:01 59 44 11 226 (SW) cirrus none 02:01 60 44 12 249 (WSW) cirrus 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: 2.7.3.2 Current TUI version: TUI 1.0.1