Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20090610 Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:18:24 +0000 (UTC) From: bketzeba@apo.nmsu.edu Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Wednesday, June 10, 2009 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------ M.Klaene B.Ketzeback Agile,SPIcam, 19:45 05:46 NA2gdr INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EN01/W 21:15 04:51 0 0 0 0 1.4 6.2 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- Observing Specialist: B.Ketzeback Obtained some scattered light data with agile through a pinhole mask in the afternoon and during twilight. Had a very difficult time getting an instrument block with agile. Pointing and tracking were quite poor at TR2 which aggravated things. Several iterations of the instrument block were measured to beat down the errors from the tracking problems. In the end it took nearly half the night to obtain the instrument block. Attempted to check collimation but could not control the shackhartmann PC remotely. I had no problem accessing it with 2 different vnc programs and I could move the cursor about with my mouse however the machine was not accepting mouse clicks or keyboard input remotely. I finally gave up after about 30 minutes and verified collimation looked acceptable using spicam. I then started to setup for a pointing model but was having some difficulty focusing both spicam and the na2 guider. Tracking and pointing appeared to be equally bad on this port as well. After about an hour of trying to adjust tertiary tilts to fix pointing I came to the conclusion that pointing was off by a large amount everywhere in the sky mostly in the altitude direction (4 to 5 arcminutes). After some experimentation I exhausted all the ways I could remember of trying to fix the problem. At this point I called Russet for assistance. The sky was quickly brightening about this time so we struggled alot with sky background and over saturated stars. Unfortunately we were unsucessful in either finding the cause of the pointing problem or getting enough points to fix pointing enough that a pointing model could be run. It is our recommendation that science will need to be preempted tonight until we can fix this. At this time we do not know if the problem is with the new altitude controller, software or something else more serious. Weather was much better than the past week however we still had partly cloudy skies most of the night and seeing varied from moderate, quite poor and sub-arcsecond throughout the night. ------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 22:01 AGILE1 0(-1829) 1 77 12.5 12.7 12.8 12.1 12.4 r 1.07 03:19 SPICAM 50( 426) 10 66 10.7 10.7 11.0 10.2 10.6 R 0.74 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:00 58 34 20 263 (W) 1178 ptly cldy none 17:00 60 34 28 242 (WSW) 929 ptly cldy none 18:00 57 31 17 250 (WSW) 901 ptly cldy none 19:00 60 29 27 268 (W) 993 clear none 20:00 57 27 19 279 (W) 1070 mstly clr none 21:00 55 28 19 282 (WNW) 1168 mstly clr none 22:00 55 26 18 287 (WNW) 803 ptly cldy none 23:00 55 27 20 274 (W) 810 ptly cldy none 00:00 54 27 12 271 (W) 855 ptly cldy none 01:00 53 26 20 282 (WNW) 822 ptly cldy none 02:00 53 21 16 266 (W) 788 ptly cldy none 03:00 52 21 15 265 (W) 701 ptly cldy none 04:00 51 20 16 268 (W) 862 clear none 05:00 50 21 17 266 (W) 829 clear none 06:00 49 21 17 263 (W) 841 ptly cldy 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