From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20070228 Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 06:58:42 -0700 (MST) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Wednesday, February 28, 2007 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- J.Fulbright G.Ruchti Echelle --:-- --:-- T.Murphy R.McMillan Apollo --:-- --:-- M.Sussman M.Sussman Echelle 04:10 06:20 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- JH02/R 18:53 22:30 0 3.6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 UW15/O 22:30 00:00 0 1.5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 NM01/R 00:00 05:38 0 1.0 0 3.2 0.1 1.3 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- 1st Half Observing Specialist: G.Saurage Clear but extremely windy. Outside 1 micron dust counts > 3000 until around 21:00, dropped a bit after that. Gusts stayed up around 40-60 mph all first half. Never opened. 2nd Half Observing Specialist: R.McMillan Second half was eventful, in an undesirable kind of way. The winds dropped before and around midnight, but since both programs had only one target, and both were in the western sky, I was conservative about making sure the wind had gone down a lot before opening. While we were closed, I did some preliminary scheduling work and also adjusted the DIS slitviewer focus. I opened the dome at 01:00, and on the first slew I noticed a bad error message from the secondary mirror. It appeared that the A actuator had gotten stuck. Further analysis showed that the first failure occurred at 22:30 when the telescope was slewed upward so that the tertiary could be rotated. Since then, the actuator failed some (long) moves, but seemed to behave correctly on shorter test moves. I phoned Mark, and he decided to come in himself since the A actuator is very hard to reach. We homed the mirror and did some tests, puzzled out some odd behavior, and decided to go on the sky barring repeat problems. Seeing turned out to be nasty, despite the reduced winds, but the observer eked out nearly two hours of data nevertheless. In morning twilight, I made some more adjustments to DIS internal focus. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEDFNVOG) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NM01 E T/H 01:00 04:10 M2 actuator A stuck ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp Strc Prim Sec Air filt FWHM ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 04:30 Echelle -300(-1680) 24 46 -11.8 -11.59 -12.31 -10.43 -11.8 ND3 2.5 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 15:55 37 6 11 278 (W) 3329 clear dust 16:55 35 11 14 272 (W) 2362 clear dust 17:55 29 12 11 270 (W) 4456 mstly clr dust 18:55 24 5 14 272 (W) 8731 mstly clr dust 19:55 23 1 13 275 (W) 3967 clear dust 20:55 20 3 12 275 (W) 1812 clear none 21:55 18 3 12 273 (W) 1845 clear none 22:55 16 4 10 278 (W) 1909 clear none 23:55 14 1 7 264 (W) 595 clear none 00:55 13 4 7 279 (W) 516 clear none 01:55 12 4 4 250 (WSW) 500 clear none 02:55 11 5 4 201 (SSW) 504 clear none 03:55 11 5 3 130 (SE) 517 clear none 04:55 11 3 4 149 (SSE) 403 clear none 05:55 11 3 8 139 (SE) 345 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 1.3