From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20070728 Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 06:14:37 -0600 (MDT) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Friday, July 27, 2007 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- M.Klaene R.McMillan DIS,SPIcam 19:45 21:45 J.Miller J.Miller Echelle 02:45 05:45 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- EN01/W 21:06 01:10 0 3.3 0 0 0 0.7 0 0 0 UV03/R 01:10 05:14 0 1.6 0 0 0.6 1.9 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: R.McMillan Az vel. scale: was 576, measured to 577, unchanged Despite a storm approaching from the northeast (yes, we really mean it this time! Really), we were able to open before sunset and stay open for a couple of hours. The tertiary had been left facing TR4 after tests during the day, and when I moved it to NA2 it reported a CHKMV error on E; the final position was off by 7500 steps. I called Russell and we confirmed that the new lookup table was loaded so it was using the latest position. I had made that first move with the telescope at alt 71 in order to get the maximum servo errors; I moved the telescope to alt 80 and tried moving the tertiary to NA2 again. This time the error was only 200 steps but it still returned a CHKMV error. Russell took over, homed the tertiary in rotation, played with it a little, and got the CHKMV to go away. Later tertiary rotations had no problems. I tested the spicam flat script, which works nicely as of TUI v1.4b. Then I went to the focus script and found a number of problems which simply were not obvious until we got on sky. Russell made a new TUI release, which I had trouble loading on my laptop for unclear reasons, so I put it in my account area on obs1. Then that version had a problem, and Russell had me edit the script, then that version had a problem. We didn't get all the way through the problems before clouds moved in. While Russell was programming and before it was necessary to close, I managed to do a teensy bit of work on tracking with the SH video. This was complicated by the fact that Timbuktu is not on obs1 or apparently on obs2, and it was configured wrongly on newton. I called Fritz and he got the newton version fixed, so I was able to talk to the Shack-Hartmann. Pointing was off (not surprisingly), but I didn't have enough time to fix it properly. I changed one parameter for altitude that appeared to improve tracking a little and didn't make slews or perturbations look too nasty. This may or may not be sufficient to deal with the somewhat minor tracking problems noted over the last two months, but at least it's something. The storm moved in and we got a little rain, then once the worst of it was past I did some work with the APOLLO laser. At the same time I exercised tertiary rotation a little more and again had no problems. The storm moved out of our way, and around 02:30 I started thinking it would be possible to open. We did struggle with some clouds for a while, but eventually they cleared away and the humidity didn't rise quite too high and we got some good data. The echelle and echelle software (including focus script, which Russell was concerned about) worked fine. ------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 02:48 Echelle -39(-463) -86 67 13.5 13.21 13.50 13.32 13.03 ND2 0.97 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 54 44 14 75 (ENE) 637 ptly cldy none 17:00 58 41 0 161 (SSE) 310 ptly cldy none 18:00 61 44 2 269 (W) 404 ptly cldy none 19:00 62 51 6 292 (WNW) 337 ptly cldy none 20:00 57 48 8 316 (NW) 351 ptly cldy none 21:00 58 48 8 314 (NW) 487 ptly cldy none 22:00 57 46 6 235 (SW) 477 mstly cldy none 23:00 51 50 20 67 (ENE) 693 cloudy none 00:00 49 49 21 53 (NE) 529 cloudy none 01:00 55 42 5 23 (NNE) 409 mstly cldy none 02:00 54 47 4 250 (WSW) 476 ptly cldy none 03:00 54 43 7 349 (N) 358 ptly cldy none 04:00 53 45 2 324 (NW) 393 mstly clr none 05:00 51 45 7 358 (N) 386 ptly cldy 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 1.3