From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20080406 Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 06:45:25 -0600 (MDT) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Sunday, April 6th, 2008 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- A.Becker A.Becker,J.Coughlin, SPIcam 19:45 00:59 G.Stringfellow Q.Hart Q.Hart,B.Keeney DIS 01:20 05:50 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- UW03/R 20:22 01:05 0 0 0.1 0 4.4 0.2 0 0 0 CU01/R 01:05 05:48 0 0 0.4 0 4.2 0 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialists: R.McMillan Dust hovered near the limit for much of first half, but inside dust levels were okay. I did get worried when the weather summary page was broken/slow to load for a period between 23:00 and midnight, but some measurements did get reported showing dust levels still acceptable though near the limit. I closed for a little while when observers were doing in-dome cals, but it was mostly just a precaution. Highish-speed photometry with SPIcam during the first half went pretty smoothly, although we discovered a bug involving overscan in the Y direction for subframes. There was one hangup at 22:41 MDT which appeared at first to be the known intermittent problem of a spurious character getting into the spicam command buffer. Usually that problem is fixed by restarting the nubs for spicam, but that didn't work in this instance; I had to restart spicc and then the nubs. Just about three minutes was lost, but I decided to count it anyway since it was in the middle of some important timing. When I changed the instruments, I moved the rotator to zero by hand. Perhaps related or perhaps not, when I did axis init (01:17 MDT) there were error messages from the rotator expressed as "servo error too large" in the status window. Although the messages in the log window appeared as warnings rather than failures, the rotator wouldn't move. On the fourth init command the error finally cleared up, and after that the rotator moved normally. We also had a problem with the echelle mirror cover flap not opening fully (with the telescope at very high altitude after wind pushed it up); it took me a few minutes to figure this out. While the observer was taking a longish exposure, guide images stopped showing up in all TUIs with the message "Download failed: couldn't open socket: connection refused." However, I could see in the Log window that guiding was still in progress. We let the DIS exposure finish (it made it to disk safely but didn't download through Auto Get), and then I tried to restart some things, but without luck. I phoned Fritz, who restarted the web server that feeds images to TUI, and after that all was well. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEDFNVOG) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- UW03 S I/S 22:41 22:44 spurious char in cmd buffer? CU01 D T/H 01:17 01:20 rot "servo error too large" CU01 D T/H 01:25 01:29 NA1 cov flap not fully open CU01 D T/S 02:18 02:35 TUI image downloads failed ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp Strc Prim Sec Air filt FWHM ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 19:16 SPICAM -12( 283) 96 45 6.5 8.6 8.3 7.6 7.2 V 1.45 00:34 dis-slit 6( -78) 179 53 6.0 6.0 6.4 5.5 5.7 - 1.40 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 53 9 10 265 (W) 3086 clear none 17:00 53 10 19 250 (WSW) 2613 clear none 18:00 53 11 21 215 (SW) 2826 clear none 19:00 48 10 16 244 (WSW) 3031 clear none 20:00 44 8 19 245 (WSW) 3202 clear none 21:00 44 9 24 246 (WSW) 2997 clear none 22:00 43 9 17 260 (W) 3101 clear none 23:00 44 9 15 261 (W) 3324 clear none 00:00 45 9 16 247 (WSW) 3269 clear none 01:00 44 10 21 243 (WSW) 2714 clear none 02:00 42 13 15 254 (WSW) 2415 clear none 03:00 43 13 16 266 (W) 2580 clear none 04:00 42 14 10 270 (W) 2611 clear none 05:00 41 15 13 276 (W) 2716 clear none 06:00 39 15 15 267 (W) 2827 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