Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20070104 Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2007 07:55:24 -0700 (MST) From: bketzeba@apo.nmsu.edu (Bill Ketzeback) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Thursday, January 04, 2007 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- G.Wolf-Chase G.Wolf-Chase,M.Smutko NicFps 17:30 23:55 G.Wallerstein G.Wallerstein,T.Means Echelle 00:00 07:00 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- UC06/R 18:08 00:00 0 0 0 0 0.2 5.7 0 0 0 UW11/R 00:00 06:09 0 0 0 0 0 6.2 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: B.Ketzeback During checkout the first image I took with nicfps had all pixels at a level of 32768. Instead of restarting the ics software I used the command 'nicfps expose init'. This cleared up the problem immediately and no other action was required. I did however contact Stephane Beland and informed him of what I had seen since that was a request made this afternoon in the Engineering Telecon. As soon as the instrument was turned over to the first observer, they started taking darks. Darks were going fine (FS=0) until image 22 when the instrument again returned to a state where it was only writing 32768 counts per pixel. This was the middle of a sequence of 120s darks. We aborted the sequence and I corrected the problem with the init command. This problem will not be considered time lost because it occured and was corrected before sunset. No other troubles were seen with the instrument first half. Tracking (and therefore image quality) in all portions of the sky was EXCELLENT tonight! Second half went smoothly. Seeing started out quite good at the beginning of the night and slowly degraded into second half. By the end of the night we were experiencing greater than 2.5 arcsecond seeing. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEDFNVOG) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp Strc Prim Sec Air filt FWHM ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 17:36 nicfps -4(443) 174 78 3.4 4.9 4.0 3.9 3.5 Ks 0.7 00:17 Echelle -63(-987) 288 67 1.9 2.2 1.8 1.9 2.0 nd2 1.2 03:09 Echelle -92(-979) 273 39 3.0 2.6 1.9 2.1 2.7 nd1 1.8 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:02 41 15 20 346 (NNW) 161 clear none 17:02 39 15 16 5 (N) 158 clear none 18:02 39 14 17 332 (NNW) 150 clear none 19:02 41 12 10 275 (W) 93 clear none 20:02 40 12 9 194 (SSW) 93 clear none 21:02 34 15 6 169 (S) 384 clear none 22:02 36 15 6 178 (S) 250 clear none 23:02 40 8 13 246 (WSW) 147 clear none 00:02 35 13 11 289 (WNW) 278 clear none 01:02 36 11 16 301 (WNW) 175 clear none 02:02 35 12 16 241 (WSW) 201 clear none 03:02 38 8 20 264 (W) 149 clear none 04:02 33 14 14 239 (WSW) 243 clear none 05:02 32 15 13 262 (W) 392 clear none 06:02 32 14 18 266 (W) 304 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: 2.8.5 Current TUI version: TUI 1.2