Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:21:24 -0600 (MDT) From: Jack Dembicky Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20080423 Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Wednesday, April 23, 2008 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- J.Wilson J.Wilson, J.Leisenring TSpec 19:30 06:30 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- EN02/O 20:36 05:26 0 0 0 0 2.5 6.4 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialists: J. Dembicky More TSpec engineering. Tonight was nice and clear for them. 2:16:40 tracking slipped bad. We saw lots of slips tonight both in the slit images and correspondingly on the Dataq diplay. Even small dips on the DataQ motor 1 were noticable. Slips were confirmed in Az direction only. I tried, in vain, to focus on a star at az=-11, alt= 80.7 and could not seem to get the telescope to put the star on the boresight. It would come close, but not close enough for the focus script to lock on. Using the nudger it seemed that I was doing largish offsets and yet not seeing as much movement as I expected. Once I did get the object on the boresight, starting the script (which moved the boresight 5 arc sec) the star kept managing to go to the left about 2 arc sec, which then the focus script could not lock onto the star since it was too far away. Also the Tspec focus script kept resetting the thresh and mult values to defaults. Maybe all the focus scripts do this, but this was the first time I noticed it. Tracking also seemed poor, perhaps all of this is because the telescope was crossing the meridian at high altitude? 04:56 Guider hung. Restarting tcamera and tcam quickly resolved the problem or so I thought. 04:56UT 04:58 guider camera appeared locked up. Got a busy controller error. Matt wanted to look into it, before I called in Fritz to work some magic. We had one hang up of the guider earlier in the evening as well, but the restarts worked then, this time something different happened. Matt traced it to a PCI card problem on the tcam side. TUI1.5b1 would not run scripts tonight (APO checkout script as well as the tspec focus and nod scripts, I suspect others as well). PR submitted. Reverted to 1.5a9, which ran the scripts fine. 5:56 emergency stop switch on rotator triggered, Called Fritz to fix after I checked the eswitch on the observing level and tried initializing the telescope a couple times. I am not sure the focus script likes the fact that the tspec images go black (black center of stars) as they saturate. Not that we probably want to focus on a saturated star, but it gives a very strange focus curve as the saturated star looks amazingly like an out of focus star with the black center. The telescope slips in Az seemed to quiet down after several hrs of operations. We would notice them occasionally but not at the frequency as the start of the night. We did see the slips in both the west and eastern parts of the sky. Other than the few glitches in the first part of the evening we had a very succesful night for Tspec and pretty smooth sailing 2nd half. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SAEDFNVOG) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp Strc Prim Sec Air filt FWHM ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 20:12 TCam 37(504) 37 66 10.4 11.7 12.2 10.6 10.5 Ks 0.98 01:26 TCam 84(433) -16 74 9.4 9.2 9.7 8.8 9.2 Ks 1.13 03:28 TCam 120(434) 102 51 8.3 8.2 8.7 7.8 8.0 Ks 0.78 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 59 13 23 242 (WSW) 1783 clear none 17:00 60 14 32 239 (WSW) 1941 clear none 18:00 57 12 19 267 (W) 1982 clear none 19:00 55 7 24 268 (W) 1931 clear none 20:00 51 6 17 251 (WSW) 1914 clear none 21:00 51 6 15 264 (W) 1879 clear none 22:00 50 6 17 252 (WSW) 1701 clear none 23:00 50 7 15 279 (W) 1746 clear none 00:00 50 6 16 296 (WNW) 1669 clear none 01:00 49 6 13 275 (W) 1799 clear none 02:00 48 6 12 266 (W) 2046 clear none 03:00 48 7 13 277 (W) 2097 clear none 04:00 46 9 19 294 (WNW) 2329 clear none 05:00 46 11 23 268 (W) 2474 clear none 06:00 45 10 20 268 (W) 2363 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 1.4.5