From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20071028 Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:49:58 -0700 (MST) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Sunday, October 28, 2007 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- E.Hilton E.Hilton,S.Hawley, DIS,Echelle 19:00 01:00 A.Kowalski,S.Schmidt T.Murphy R.McMillan APOLLO 01:06 02:03 N.Silvestri M.Agueros DIS 02:12 06:35 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- UW08/R 19:11 01:05 0 0 0.1 0 1.0 4.9 0 0 0 UW15/O 01:05 02:05 0 0 0 0 0 1.0 0 0 0 UW13/R 02:05 06:24 0 0 0 0 0 5.3 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialists: R.McMillan Beautiful clear night with good seeing throughout. During checkout, I found NIC giving saturated short darks again, and reset everything again to see if the instrument could be made usable (the second half program was interested in using it, but had a backup program ready). The reset worked, but a few hours later it was saturating 12s darks again. I reset again and took darks at intervals for a while, and found that the background level increased monotonically with time regardless of the interval between images. This does mean the instrument is unusable, since the varying background messes up calibrations even when it isn't saturated -- and it will saturate again within a few hours. Pointing was fairly good at the beginning of the night with DIS. Then on one slew (which happened to unwrap in azimuth, probably unrelated), there was a bad magnesensor crossing in the altitude direction which messed up pointing. This caused some puzzlement since the target was a high proper motion star anyway -- but once we realized what had happened, the fix was quick. Strangely, after the magnesensors were responding normally I had to do a fairly large pointing adjustment with the tertiary (+500 Ytilt). This kept the pointing okay for the remainder of first half. When we switched to the echelle, a very similar adjustment was needed at that port (+400 Ytilt). We got echelle spectra of the comet (about one-tenth as bright as it was on Wednesday) and the moon. APOLLO netted three reflectors and actually managed to top last night's record, which was pretty impressive. Second half was peaceful and mostly free of trouble, except for one case where I closed covers for the observer to take some cals, and the altitude didn't recognize the stop button and kept trying to track. When I parked the telescope in the morning, the altitude responded normally to the stop button. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEDFNVOG) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- UW08 D T/H 21:00 21:08 bad magnesensor measurement ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp Strc Prim Sec Air filt FWHM ----------------------------------------------------------------- 19:30 dis-slit -300( -51) 209 55 7.6 10.2 9.5 8.4 8.1 - 0.9 00:21 ECHELLE -141( -805) 137 62 8.4 7.7 8.2 6.9 7.9 ND2 0.9 02:18 dis-slit -100( 37) 7 67 7.9 7.8 8.2 6.9 7.8 - 0.9 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 52 25 5 249 (WSW) 743 clear none 17:00 53 27 7 233 (SW) 774 clear none 18:00 49 27 8 216 (SW) 778 clear none 19:00 44 27 2 196 (SSW) 798 clear none 20:00 47 25 1 153 (SSE) 774 clear none 21:00 48 18 5 106 (ESE) 662 clear none 22:00 47 24 11 126 (SE) 781 clear none 23:00 47 24 9 113 (ESE) 786 clear none 00:00 46 18 11 111 (ESE) 816 clear none 01:00 47 23 11 111 (ESE) 902 clear none 02:00 46 20 8 118 (ESE) 834 clear none 03:00 46 17 13 131 (SE) 745 clear none 04:00 46 14 5 174 (S) 526 clear none 05:00 45 14 14 125 (SE) 630 clear none 06:00 46 15 11 134 (SE) 602 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 1.4.1