From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20080518 Date: Mon, 19 May 2008 05:43:59 -0600 (MDT) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Sunday, May 18, 2008 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- M.Gladders E.Wuyts NICFPS 20:20 23:55 T.Murphy R.McMillan APOLLO 00:00 01:00 G.Wolf-Chase M.Smutko,G.Wolf-Chase NICFPS 01:05 05:10 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- UC01/R 20:58 00:05 0 0 0 0 0 3.1 0 0 0 UW15/O 00:05 01:05 0 0 0 0 0 1.0 0 0 0 UC02/R 01:05 05:01 0 0 0 0 0 3.9 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: R.McMillan During checkout, I tried exercising tertiary rotation in hopes that would prevent a problem from cropping up at the midnight instrument change. I got a failure with CHKMV during checkout which required homing, but the port changes at midnight and 1:00 am were fine. Also during checkout, I made a small change to the az (584 -> 582) and alt (-634 -> -636) velocity scales. But on a slew near midnight the azimuth was very noisy, so I remeasured the velocity scale and got 574. This change is not entirely unexpected given the large temp changes over the past day or so, but it was somewhat more extreme than I thought we would see. First half was very peaceful, with mostly clear skies and good seeing. NIC-FPS behaved perfectly, and I ran the autofocus script with no trouble. Seeing was somewhat poorer for APOLLO and clouds were starting to move in, but we managed to beat the curse and get a full-moon datapoint to add to our collection. Second half also had mediocre seeing and continued high thin clouds. I tried running the autofocus script again but felt the focus offsets it was making were too aggressive even though I adjusted some parameters. So I stopped that and left it alone. The remainder of second half was very peaceful. ------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------- 19:22 NICFPS -47( 875) 68 75 12.3 14.8 14.5 13.5 13.2 H 0.60 00:19 NICFPS -60( 705) 84 43 10.5 11.0 11.4 10.5 10.9 Ks 1.10 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 58 31 7 270 (W) 2816 ptly cldy none 17:00 63 30 17 268 (W) 2900 ptly cldy none 18:00 61 28 6 284 (WNW) 2960 ptly cldy none 19:00 61 25 7 279 (W) 2689 mstly clr none 20:00 56 22 2 316 (NW) 2770 mstly clr none 21:00 55 23 2 218 (SW) 3176 mstly clr none 22:00 54 24 11 217 (SW) 3181 mstly clr none 23:00 53 24 12 216 (SW) 3183 mstly clr none 00:00 52 24 13 209 (SSW) 2967 ptly cldy none 01:00 52 24 11 201 (SSW) 2842 ptly cldy none 02:00 51 23 9 247 (WSW) 2806 ptly cldy none 03:00 51 23 10 233 (SW) 2779 ptly cldy none 04:00 51 23 8 267 (W) 2758 mstly clr none 05:00 52 21 7 234 (SW) 2616 mstly clr 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