From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20071213 Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2007 06:15:53 -0700 (MST) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Thursday, December 13, 2007 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------ J.Stocke J.Stocke,K.Willet, Nicfps, 18:05 21:35 Q.Hart SPIcam 21:50 00:00 R.Overzier R.Overzier DIS 00:15 02:00 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B -------------------------------------------------------------------- CU04/R 17:56 00:05 0 0.2 0.2 0 3.1 2.6 0 0 0 JH03/R 00:05 05:59 3.9 0 0 0 2.0 0 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialists: R.McMillan, J.Coughlin We had variable clouds and variable (good to moderate) seeing for most of the night. Clouds got thicker midway through second half, and humidity picked up toward the end of second half. NIC-FPS had an interesting symptom where there was a longish delay (10-20s) between the end of a readout and when TUI announced that an exposure was done (which was also when the exposure appeared on disk). I presume this was due to the NFS mounting weirdness that has been noted with NIC-FPS recently. It got worse between from the first time I restarted the ICS to the second time, and I was reluctant to do more restarts for fear it would break the NFS mount completely. It was not seriously hampering observations because the exposure times were on the long side, but it did extend the focusing process somewhat. There was a bad altitude magnesensor measurement during tracking while NIC-FPS was in use; by coincidence, I saw the brief error message when this occurred. So the next time the observers wanted to slew, I ran the telescope down and up before letting them make their slew. Barely a minute of time was lost. This occurred while tracking in the SW, which has not previously been a trouble spot; however, we were pointing into a medium wind and seeing some image-quality symptoms of windshake, so it's possible the telescope bobbled just at the time of the magnesensor crossing or something like that. While SPIcam was in use, it started to give some serial port error messages. I went straight for the instrument reset switch rather than trying any lesser measures; the reset plus restarting the icc program and the nubs cleared the problem up. The observer was concerned that it might have been caused when she requested a filter change during readout; I thought the software should be able to handle that, but it's something worth testing to see if it causes a repeat. This cost about 10 minutes of time. DIS worked well and had no problems. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEDFNVPA) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CU04 S I/S 23:00 23:10 SPIcam serial port error ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp Strc Prim Sec Air filt FWHM ----------------------------------------------------------------- 18:22 NICFPS -100( 247) -42 49 0.4 0.7 0.6 0.3 0.4 Ks 0.72 19:04 NICFPS -125( 216) -10 46 0.5 0.5 0.6 0.2 0.5 Ks 0.91 22:12 SPICAM -78( -127) 30 59 0.0 -0.1 0.2 -0.6 -0.2 r 1.23 00:28 dis-slit -120( -312) 92 58 -0.4 0.0 0.2 -0.4 -0.2 - 1.05 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 33 15 9 204 (SSW) 170 ptly cldy none 17:00 32 14 14 192 (SSW) 169 ptly cldy none 18:00 33 12 14 202 (SSW) 175 ptly cldy none 19:00 33 12 14 222 (SW) 167 ptly cldy none 20:00 33 10 18 199 (SSW) 170 ptly cldy none 21:00 34 14 26 227 (SW) 317 mstly clr none 22:00 32 15 17 208 (SSW) 209 ptly cldy none 23:00 33 14 18 206 (SSW) 229 ptly cldy none 00:00 32 18 19 203 (SSW) 348 clear none 01:00 31 21 16 206 (SSW) 475 ptly cldy none 02:00 31 22 12 205 (SSW) 487 mstly cldy none 03:00 30 23 14 208 (SSW) 556 cloudy none 04:00 30 25 16 224 (SW) 677 cloudy humid 05:00 28 25 14 257 (WSW) 745 mstly cldy humid 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 1.4.3