From: Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20091008 Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 13:01:03 +0000 (UTC) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Thursday, October 8, 2009 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------ G.Stringfellow G.Stringfellow Tspec 19:15 00:00 C. Miller C. Miller, N. Chanover, AGILE 00:00 07:15 E. Ramesh, R. McMillan INST SCHEDULED WEATH EQUIP OBS NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B D B ------------------------------------------------------------------- CU01/O 18:46 00:00 0 0 0.8 0 2.0 2.4 0 0 NM01/O 00:00 06:55 0 0 0 0.2 0 6.7 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: R. McMillan An interesting squeaker of a night. Three weather systems threatened us from different directions at sunset; all dissipated with no more than a few clouds. Many axis problems caused headaches during first half, but improved second half for unclear reasons. Seeing was poorish even with Triplespec during first half, but got down to subarcsecond levels during the morning. During first half and the early portion of second half, we had axis problems including 6 azimuth servo errors at the beginnings of slews (plus many more during test slews while Fritz was working on the controllers for half an hour), 3 azimuth servo errors while the telescope was tracking, 2 altitude servo errors while we were trying to recover from other problems, 2 suspicious guider-misbehavior incidents which happened to result in offsets in the azimuth direction, and one case of the azimuth axis getting grossly lost by 255 degrees (!), which fortunately we were able to recover from quickly thanks to having the moon as an azimuth reference point. I had to estimate total downtime for all these incidents. Details and timestamps sent separately to the engineering staff. During second half the telescope's tracking and slewing behavior improved; we had only one problem after 1 am even though we tracked the moon through a transit at 83 deg altitude. Was this improvement due to the telescope coming to temperature equilibrium? The calming of the high winds (actually, during first half the telescope tracked acceptably for nearly an hour facing into a 30 mph wind, then failed on the next slew). Or was it bizarrely due to the coincidence that the azimuth telemetry display stopped updating sometime around 1 am or so? The telescope and Agile both performed flawlessly for the observations of the LCROSS impact. Like other ground-based observatories, we didn't get immediate dramatic results; further analysis of the images will be required. We did make one of the nicer movies of the event, which is hosted on NASA's website. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEDFNVOG) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ------------------------------------------------------------------- CU01 T T/S 20:00 20:18 servo errors, total time est. CU01 T T/S 21:55 22:30 Fritz working on controllers NM01 P T/S 00:06 00:14 Az axis badly lost NM01 P T/S 07:00 07:06 servo errors, est time tot ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp Strc Prim Sec Air filt FWHM ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 21:23 TSPEC 175( 311) 291 68 4.6 4.8 5.1 4.5 4.5 K 1.20 00:20 AGILE 100(-2186) 62 83 3.3 3.4 3.6 2.9 3.2 V+ND2.5 1.40 03:23 AGILE 100(-2152) 97 32 4.0 3.1 3.5 2.7 3.2 V+ND2.5 0.80 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 47 24 22 262 (W) 1485 clear none 17:00 47 19 23 268 (W) 1107 clear none 18:00 46 20 24 260 (W) 1440 clear none 19:00 43 17 11 267 (W) 1389 clear none 20:00 42 17 19 284 (WNW) 1334 clear none 21:00 41 18 13 282 (WNW) 1452 mstly clr none 22:00 40 19 15 283 (WNW) 1968 mstly clr none 23:00 39 20 8 288 (WNW) 2269 mstly clr none 00:00 39 21 21 306 (NW) 2229 mstly clr none 01:00 38 22 15 319 (NW) 1974 clear none 02:00 39 20 8 347 (NNW) 1550 clear none 03:00 39 18 9 338 (NNW) 1481 clear none 04:00 39 17 11 330 (NNW) 1545 clear none 05:00 38 18 3 282 (WNW) 1630 clear none 06:00 37 18 9 339 (NNW) 1632 clear none TELESCOPE STATUS Telescope drives operational. Current TCC version: 2.10.0 Current TUI version: TUI 1.6.2