Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20090528 Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 12:50:58 +0000 (UTC) From: bketzeba@apo.nmsu.edu Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Thursday, May 28, 2009 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- J.Wisniewski B.Woodgate,C.Grady GFP --:-- --:-- W.Bhatti W.Bhatti,J.Rogers Nicfps 01:45 04:40 INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B ---------------------------------------------------------------------- UW11/O 21:06 01:05 0.7 3.3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 JH02/R 01:05 04:55 0.5 0 0.8 0 2.5 0 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: B.Ketzeback Az Vel Scale Was 579 Measured 575.8 n/c Alt Vel Scale Was -603 Measured -604.3 n/c A very frustrating night of poor weather and equipemnt problems. First half was completely weathered out but much of it was spent chasing and recovering from various problems. The Goddard folks had some instrument problems in the afternoon. About the same time I discovered I had no control of the eyelids in either auto or manual modes. Mirror covers worked just fine. I called Nick back in to help track the problem down. We discovered that the compressed air that operates the eyelids was down. The PMSS air was fine. After spending a great deal of time chasing air hoses around the telescope we found a closed valve in the shop. Because of this distraction I did not get around to doing instrument checkouts until nearly midnight. At that time I found I could not get images from the echelle slitviewer, spicam, tspec, tspec slitviewer and nicfps. I was able to quickly recover echelle slitviewer and nicfps however the others were quite troublesome. I tried several tricks to bring spicam up for the second half user without much luck. The instrument motor controller (filter wheel) works and the hub/icc believes that it is successfully taking an image (no errors) but all pixels are of zero value. I finally gave up at 01:45 and suggested the observers use their backup instrument. Nicfps had checked out just fine earlier however there was a number of spurous internet connectivity issues around the same time and the instrument would not respond. It took a stopping and restarting of the ics software to bring the instrument back up. A oftware reset of the ics (nicfps expose init) did not work in this case. The internet connectivity presented a problem for the observers as well as Russet who was trying to determine the state of Apollo's ICC after last nights problems. Our weather data was also several hours old and conditions were still not great. Many of our internal webpages were also unresponsive including the site Network Operations Center. I am counting 30 minutes total time lost to internet problems although this may be an overly conservative estimate of the time lost. I also had started to recover tspec and tspec slitviewer but had to leave it in a powered down state while I tackled several of the other problems. This caused several critical alert emails to be generated. Once I had time to properly recover the instrument and take test images the alert messages cleared. It required DSP resets of both fiber communication boards in the ICCs to bring both cameras back online. We were able to open for much of second half but by 0440 the observers ran out of targets. Clouds continued to be a problem as well. Seeing was quite good for nicfps. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEDFNVOG) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- JH02 S I/H 01:30 01:45 Images produce all zeros JH02 N I/S 01:55 02:01 Loss of communication to inst ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp Strc Prim Sec Air filt FWHM -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02:14 NICFPS -200( 479) 25 78 9.4 9.8 9.9 9.1 9.2 Ks 0.73 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 59 28 7 252 (WSW) 1223 ptly cldy none 17:00 65 32 7 311 (NW) 1206 ptly cldy none 18:00 53 33 12 60 (ENE) 1147 ptly cldy none 19:00 53 34 10 27 (NNE) 2256 ptly cldy none 20:00 53 27 11 305 (NW) 1222 ptly cldy none 21:00 51 28 11 8 (N) 1273 mstly clr none 22:00 11 33 (NNE) 1219 mstly cldy none 23:00 52 25 11 358 (N) 1160 ptly cldy none 00:00 48 27 11 83 (E) 1082 mstly clr none 01:00 46 31 1 153 (SSE) 1175 mstly clr none 02:00 48 32 4 251 (WSW) 1171 mstly clr none 03:00 48 32 4 187 (S) 1124 clear none 04:00 47 34 16 146 (SE) 1031 clear none 05:00 46 41 11 180 (S) 1265 clear none 06:00 45 38 9 178 (S) 1201 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: 2.10.0