From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20070911 Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 06:02:06 -0600 (MDT) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Tuesday, September 11, 2007 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- M.Klaene R.McMillan DIS,NA2gdr, 01:30 05:50 SH, SPIcam INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- EN02/W 20:09 05:51 5.4 0 0 0 4.3 0 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialists: R.McMillan First half was mostly cloudy and very humid. I confirmed that the shims added to the DIS R1200 grating had moved the spectrum close to the center of the chip (and the red side video is also un-reversed!) I also did some extra slew tests. The clouds cleared around midnight, but humidity remained high. I opened at 01:30 under clear skies and borderline humidity, planning just to get one high-priority throughput measurement and then close before the telescope got too cold. This was somewhat complicated by bad pointing (my fault; I hadn't crossed a magensensor on my first slew) and odd focus numbers. The images were also very comatic, although this could be due to a temperature gradient across the primary as much as poor collimation. Ideally, I'd like to measure collimation after the telescope has time to cool. I cleared up the pointing and focus troubles, observed the throughput standard, and just as I was ready to close the humidity dropped. I watched the humidity while I grabbed some images with the NA2 guider, but it seemed to be mostly steady. So I decided to give the Shack-Hartmann a try even though the telescope wasn't as cool as I'd like. I observed one star with the Shack-Hartmann but found that I couldn't reduce the data -- I wasn't sure if this was because the collimation was off so far, or because of a problem with the reference frame. I mounted SPIcam, tested the focus script under TUI 1.4, and then did a rough collimation by the old focus-donut method. Mark had indicated to me that I should adjust collimation by translating the secondary, but that was when we thought the work with the autocollimator had gotten it pretty close to start with. I found numbers that produced reasonable images for either mirror translation or tilt, but I'm not sure which to use. Armed with this information, I went back to the Shack-Hartmann and tried again, starting out closer to decent collimation (and with the telescope a few hours closer to temperature equilibrium). Now I was able to reduce some but not all of the SH data, so possibly the reference LED is slightly off but also the poor collimation contributed. ------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 01:55 DISslit -600 1.5 02:20 NA2guider -450 02:35 SH -700 03:30 SPIcam -450 1.2 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 55 50 4 224 (SW) 1981 ptly cldy humid 17:00 55 51 1 276 (W) 480 ptly cldy humid 18:00 53 49 1 265 (W) 249 ptly cldy humid 19:00 53 48 2 11 (N) 326 ptly cldy humid 20:00 51 48 11 62 (ENE) 1081 ptly cldy humid 21:00 52 47 11 77 (ENE) 571 ptly cldy humid 22:00 53 48 2 345 (NNW) 132 mstly cldy humid 23:00 52 48 4 49 (NE) 86 mstly cldy humid 00:00 51 48 0 320 (NW) 88 ptly cldy humid 01:00 51 48 1 94 (E) 112 clear humid 02:00 51 48 9 81 (E) 64 clear none 03:00 52 45 5 358 (N) 26 mstly clr none 04:00 53 39 1 148 (SSE) 222 clear none 05:00 52 43 2 197 (SSW) 495 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