From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20061019 Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 08:01:48 -0600 (MDT) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Thursday, October 19, 2006 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- S.Anderson S.Anderson DIS 19:35 01:10 R.Walterbos R.Walterbos DIS 01:10 06:30 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- UW03/R 19:19 01:10 0 0 0.7 0 5.1 0 0 0 0 NM02/R 01:10 06:17 0 0 0.1 0 4.1 0.6 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- 1st Half Observing Specialist: G.Saurage Clear evening, at least weather was not a problem. I began the night with telstop/telrun, restarting mc, etc. as usual. Did fills as usual, then tried to open the mirror covers at the dome computer via telmech command. Nothing. I went back to control room and tcc commands would not work either. For instance, I could not set the inst to DIS, or do an axis init. I restarted the nub. Same response. I started all over (telstop, telrun, tcc nub, restart mc). Still could not set inst to DIS, or init the axes. I went through this a few times. There was a TUI running on Obs-1, I closed it and a terminal window there. Suddenly the instrument changed to DIS - Don't know if it's a coincidence? Then tcc seemed to be responding but no telmech commands worked. I decided to make sure the mirror covers worked manually. They did. I left them in manual mode to do cals and figure out what was happening. The Enclosure gui was saying actor timed out. So I was avoiding any telmech commands, using tcc encl instead. Russet recommended restarting the telmech nub, and that cleared up the gui and allowed telmech commands to work again. Can't say I know what had happened to cause problems with these systems, but things seemed to be working again. By that time we were taking cals and the observers were having trouble accessing their data. The observers were having trouble ftp-ing their data from Tycho, they said it was too slow, so I suggested they use Newton. They tried logging in using the standard user and password for Tycho. Didn't work. They called and I gave them the institutional user name and password. They were able to log in fine after that. DIS slitviewer shutter was a little sticky at the beginning of the night again, but seemed fine after some exercising. Slits & slit masks seemed to be doing the right thing tonight as well. 2nd Half Observing Specialist: R.McMillan Second half remained clear and fine. A wind shift to the north caused some seeing problems for the 2.5m but was less of a problem for us. The second half observer had a complex setup that took a while to get going. Most of the overhead was inevitable for such a program, but we did find one very cool and unusual bug where TUI would not let us select the fourth position on the slitwheel from the pulldown menu; instead, it always sent us to the fifth position. I had to use low-level commands to get around it. Once we finally got going, everything worked very smoothly. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEDFNVOG) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- UW03 D T/S 19:19 20:00 TCC slowdown/hangup NM02 D I/S 02:43 02:47 TUI pulldown menu problem ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp Strc Prim Sec Air filt FWHM ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 20:10 DISslit -25(-65) 70 80 4.5 4.9 3.8 4.2 4.2 -- 1.6 22:20 DISslit 0(-30) -44 49 4.6 4.2 3.6 4.0 4.3 -- 1.1 02:36 DISslit -50(-110) -72 61 4.0 4.0 3.4 3.6 4.2 -- 1.1 03:00 DIS-red -90(-143) -77 57 4.9 4.0 3.4 3.7 4.5 6560 1.2 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 45 13 7 1 (N) 117 clear none 17:00 42 4 3 353 (N) 100 clear none 18:00 40 -6 17 6 (N) 83 clear none 19:00 38 0 21 25 (NNE) 145 clear none 20:00 40 14 19 13 (NNE) 207 clear none 21:01 40 18 16 34 (NE) 292 clear none 22:01 40 14 10 6 (N) 338 clear none 23:01 40 15 14 18 (NNE) 370 clear none 00:01 40 17 13 24 (NNE) 355 clear none 01:01 41 13 21 15 (NNE) 303 clear none 02:01 40 11 14 352 (N) 292 clear none 03:01 41 11 10 357 (N) 251 clear none 04:01 41 3 13 333 (NNW) 244 clear none 05:01 40 6 11 329 (NNW) 246 clear none 06:01 40 4 14 340 (NNW) 241 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 TCC version: 2.8.4 Current TUI version: TUI 1.2