From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20060512 Date: Sat, 13 May 2006 05:44:26 -0600 (MDT) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Friday, May 12, 2006 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH -------------------------------------------------------------------- D.York R.McMillan,F.Hearty DIS,NIC 22:35 00:03 T.Murphy R.McMillan,J.Battat, APOLLO 00:05 01:55 E.Swanson,C.D.Hoyle D.York F.Hearty NIC 01:58 03:05 G.Wolf-Chase M.Smutko NIC 03:05 05:30 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B ---------------------------------------------------------------------- UC05/W/D 20:53 00:00 0 0 0 1.7 0 1.4 0 0 0 DD01/W 00:00 02:00 0 0 0 0 0 2.0 0 0 0 UC05/R/D 02:00 03:00 0 0 0 0 0 1.0 0 0 0 UC04/R 02:00 05:06 0 0 0 0 0 2.1 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: Russet McMillan Varying high clouds tonight, with moderate to good seeing. During checkout, the altitude controller stopped responding. After some effort at troubleshooting by telephone, Mark and Fritz came to the site to diagnose the problem. It turned out to be a broken communications link, so we were able to get on the sky a few hours late. We chased a GRB by voluntary trade between the program PIs. There was too much moon to get anything with DIS, but we saw the afterglow in the IR with NIC. APOLLO had less luck, getting no returns from the moon -- possibly it was related to the mediocre seeing since the moon was at rather high airmass. Next we went back to the GRB for shots in a couple more IR bands, before returning to scheduled observations. Seeing got as good as 0.65 arcseconds with NIC-FPS, although it took a lot of effort to track the focus. I saw some possible tracking trouble in the az direction at high southern transit, and adjusted tuning parameters a little. It seemed to help, but was not a complete examination of the parameter space. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEDFNVOG) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Air/Truss Wind Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp-C Dir MPH filt FWHM --------------------------------------------------------------------- 22:49 DISslit 75(1206) 351 82 15.2/15.5 259 7 - 1.2 23:18 NICFPS 115(1631) 322 79 15.1/15.1 257 8 Ks 0.71 02:03 NICFPS 125(1681) 297 50 14.7/14.4 287 9 - 0.76 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------ 16:01 65 21 7 271 (W) 3176 mstly clr none 17:01 68 22 12 265 (W) 3136 mstly clr none 18:01 64 20 13 282 (WNW) 3075 mstly clr none 19:01 63 21 9 282 (WNW) 3234 cirrus none 20:01 59 21 4 233 (SW) 3265 cirrus none 21:01 60 21 9 219 (SW) 3487 cirrus none 22:01 58 16 12 248 (WSW) 3486 cirrus none 23:01 59 15 8 258 (WSW) 3321 cirrus none 00:01 59 15 7 266 (W) 3381 mstly clr none 01:01 58 14 3 265 (W) 3301 mstly clr none 02:01 58 15 6 286 (WNW) 3322 cirrus none 03:01 59 15 10 333 (NNW) 3346 ptly cldy none 04:01 57 13 4 304 (NW) 3448 ptly cldy none 05:01 54 11 2 2 (N) 3315 mstly 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 TCC version: 2.8.4 Current TUI version: TUI 1.1