From: Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20080914 Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:45:39 +0000 (UTC) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Sunday, September 14, 2008 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- G.Wolf-Chase M.Smutko,G.Wolf-Chase NIC-FPS 20:10 00:55 T.Murphy R.McMillan APOLLO 01:02 02:02 K.O'Malia K.O'Malia NIC,Echelle 02:05 05:30 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- UC03/R 20:04 01:05 0 0.1 0 0 0 4.9 0 0 0 DD01/O 01:05 02:05 0 0 0 0 0 1.0 0 0 0 CU01/R 02:05 05:54 0 0 0 0 0 3.8 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: R.McMillan A humidity spike at sunset kept us closed until the end of twilight. After that, conditions were reasonably good except for seeing, which ranged from moderate to very bad. 30-mph winds caused a few cases of noticeable windshake in images, especially for targets at high altitude. APOLLO struggled with the bad seeing but managed to get some signal at a very full moon phase, which will be a valuable addition to the data sample. Fritz had made another adjustment to the guiding software. There were no hangups with gcam, but I didn't run it very much since it has trouble working with the NIC-FPS dither scripts -- so this wasn't a very rigorous test. A more impressive result was no hangups with ecam while we spent some hours on a target. A quick check with the echelle showed that we still have the pointing anomaly noted during shutdown recovery, which may be related to tertiary sag. This will be a topic of study during the upcoming engineering. After much struggle and help from Fritz, I managed to get the Shack-Hartmann taking reasonable-looking images. It still needs some work in order to be able to reduce properly, but we will be able to obtain data in the next few nights to work on later. ------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 20:23 NICFPS 10( 681) -1 58 6.7 9.5 9.0 8.1 7.1 Ks 1.00 01:09 APOLLO -25( 789) -9 56 7.0 6.2 6.7 6.0 6.7 2.00 02:28 NICFPS -80( 410) 9 65 5.5 5.8 6.2 5.4 5.5 J 2.10 03:26 ECHELLE -116( -944) -43 76 5.9 5.6 6.0 5.2 5.7 ND2 1.60 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 50 39 21 74 (ENE) 580 mstly clr none 17:00 51 38 8 76 (ENE) 613 mstly clr none 18:00 50 38 16 79 (E) 609 mstly clr none 19:00 46 40 25 65 (ENE) 657 mstly clr humid 20:00 44 38 23 73 (ENE) 770 mstly clr none 21:00 44 27 25 74 (ENE) 582 clear none 22:00 43 31 23 74 (ENE) 433 clear none 23:00 43 30 14 86 (E) 431 clear none 00:00 44 24 16 109 (ESE) 381 clear none 01:00 45 22 19 112 (ESE) 404 clear none 02:00 43 29 16 82 (E) 527 clear none 03:00 43 31 18 79 (E) 568 clear none 04:00 43 30 15 87 (E) 476 ptly cldy none 05:00 41 34 16 88 (E) 578 ptly cldy none 06:00 43 28 23 111 (ESE) 656 ptly cldy none 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 1.5