From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20071003 Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 06:35:54 -0600 (MDT) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Tuesday, October 02, 2007 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- J.Greene J.Greene SPIcam 19:10 01:02 T.Murphy R.McMillan Apollo 02:07 02:12 D.York D.York Echelle,DIS 02:17 06:15 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B -------------------------------------------------------------------- PU01/R 19:40 01:05 0 0 0 0 3.8 1.6 0 0 0 UW15/O 01:05 02:05 0 0 0 0 0 0.1 0 0 0 UC04/R 02:05 06:05 0 0 0 0.3 0 3.7 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: R.McMillan A productive night, but not an easy one. Clear with excellent seeing at first, then varying clouds and seeing in the middle of the night, then clear again. The TUI spicam controls all worked perfectly, including flat and focus scripts. Magnesensor errors were up to 1 arcminute but the pointing was good enough for spicam's field of view. Elongated images indicated some tracking problems in the azimuth direction; I tried adjusting several PID loop parameters and made one change permanent since it seemed to help. APOLLO was very fraught. It was improperly scheduled (oops) so the moon was too low, one spotter's alarm clock didn't go off (found an emergency fill-in), and the laser overheated because a breaker had been tripped accidentally, turning off the chiller. Once this was cleared up, we had the challenge of correcting bad pointing through variable clouds. And then waiting for clouds to clear. Stubbornly, we tried for the moon in the last five minutes of our time (okay, a little bit past our time) and actually got usable returns. The echelle wasn't easy, either. I was concerned that our recent pointing problems would be harder to deal with given the slitviewer's small FOV, and this proved to be absolutely true. I had to correct pointing three times for two targets (made even more difficult by still more variable clouds). All of the corrections were in a direction consistent with either telescope altitude or tertiary Ytilt, so it's hard to know which system was responsible -- but normally the tertiary should not be varying like this without changing ports. There was also trouble with the remote observer's display of slitviewer images, which had me very confused for a while because I thought he was running on a Mac. It turned out this was the first use of v1.4 on a Linux machine, so the install was probably messed up; the observer will have his sysadmin work on it. For tonight, I ran the slitviewer(s). With DIS, pointing was still bad but we could cope because of the larger FOV. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEDFNVOG) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- UC04 E T/H 02:30 02:45 pointing problems ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp Strc Prim Sec Air filt FWHM ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 19:34 SPICAM -66(486) -106 55 12.0 13.7 13.4 12.7 12.3 g 0.67 04:08 dis-slit -74(215) -41 62 11.7 11.3 11.7 10.9 11.4 - 0.84 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 57 45 13 311 (NW) 763 clear none 17:00 55 46 8 327 (NNW) 752 clear none 18:00 56 46 6 323 (NW) 806 clear none 19:00 54 45 1 304 (NW) 785 clear none 20:00 53 45 7 334 (NNW) 645 clear none 21:00 54 45 17 326 (NW) 605 clear none 22:00 53 46 15 314 (NW) 596 ptly cldy none 23:00 53 45 11 320 (NW) 535 ptly cldy none 00:00 54 40 10 336 (NNW) 558 ptly cldy none 01:00 54 36 5 354 (N) 657 ptly cldy none 02:00 53 44 6 349 (N) 519 ptly cldy none 03:00 52 45 10 333 (NNW) 643 clear none 04:00 53 39 11 325 (NW) 739 clear none 05:00 53 38 10 317 (NW) 799 clear none 06:00 52 39 11 326 (NW) 730 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: 2.9.1 Current TUI version: TUI 1.4