LBT OSU/RC Queue Observing: UTC 2008 March 8

Observers: Peter Garnavich, Rick Pogge, Jose Prieto
TO: Aaron Ceranski
AA: Marco Pedani


Summary:

Slow start as Rick & Jose were late getting to the summit because of travel
delays getting to Tucson because of bad weather in the rest of the country.
Started out clear at sunset, but cirrus moved in around 3UT and the sky was
solid overcast by dawn.  Seeing started out poor but improved to subarcsecond
as the night went on.  A total of 70+ science images taken in both cameras, but a few
observations got aborted when it started out nice but seeing or transparency
degraded as noted below.


Programs Observed: (bad seeing and setup problems)
   UVA_Mkn34: all OBs executed, program completed
   OSUmonitor dailies: M82, M81, N4258, and M101
   OSUmonitor epochs for N2903, N4826, 
   Aborted attempt at OSUweaklens MAX8 - stopped by rapid seeing degradation


Details:

- Took flats and darks at the beginning of the night

- Moved to standard SA98 

- Running idl code lbcfpia to collimate (run IDL;"lbcfpia" for blue side; "lbcfpia, /red" for red)
-- Errors within 500nm should be good. 
-- The programs sometimes fails when its too far of. Corrections should be sent manually in that
case.


--- UT 03:16 

- SA98 OB, cirrus overhead 

- Seeing monitor gives seeing 2 arcsec, and going up (lost star in seeing monitor)

- Seeing from the image is ~7 pixels 

--- UT 03:30

- Moving to M82 focus OB 

- Ran focus OB on M82 offset field. Z4 (defocus) was high in red and blue side .. sent corrections in both.
In second iteration red still has large defocus (~1000 nm). Estimated seeing is ~1 arcsec.


--- UT 03:43

- Now exposing in M82 field. The images looks completely out of focus in red, in blue also .. going back
to taking focus images in the offset field. 

- Second try with focusing .. still negative focus strangely, in both blue and red sides. After one iteration,
it looks much better, all the terms within ~400nm .. going again to M82

-- UT 04:03

- Starting to expose again in M82. Stamps of guiding stars look better than before. Still image in 
red look pretty bad. Stars look like rings in r-besel. John Hill that the most likely a problem with 
the filter offset. 

- Aaron changed the r-band offset from 0.6 -- 0.7mm .. didn't work .. changed to 0.5mm and
it worked much better. Now changed to 0.47 mm .. a little better from the guiding star images. 
Now trying 0.44mm .. looks a little better (04:27). Changing the offset of the r-band filter in the 
file. 

-- UT 4:46

- Focusing again on M82 after changing the file with the zeropoint offset definitions for the 
r-band. After 2 focus images going again to M82 to finally try science exposures that may
look decent. 

-- UT 04:54 

- Went to M82. Seeing looks a bit worse, but its focused. Seeing is 6.4 pixels = 1.5 arcsec 
in r-band, 7.4 pixels = 1.7 arcsec. 

- Changed to M81. V-besel in red side looks out of focus, like r-band looked before ... seems
like the same problem. r-band looks good in red side and also blue, seeing around 1.5 arcsec

-- UT 05:20 

- Moving to UVa program of Mrk 34 .. first focus doesn't look bad, less than ~600nm all of them. 

-- UT 05:28 

- Starting exposure on Mrk 34 .. r-band Sloan looks bad. Went back to focus to see what's going on. 
It looks like the problem is in the offset of the r-sloan, similar to the r-besel. 

- We re-start the OB to see how the guide star changes when trying different offsets. Tried an 
offset of 0.5mm and the guide star looks much better. Marco is changing again the file with the 
offsets. 

-- UT 05:42 

- Started again the OB .. this time the seeing looks good ~1.2 arcsec from the guide star. 
After the first exposures in V and r, which look good (1.1 arcsec seeing), the guide star in
the second exposure in the red side looks really bad. Had to stop OB and go to focus to 
see if the focus changed (?!).  After first focus image, the computed defocus is ~1600
in both blue and red images .. using only 3 stars for the solution. 

-- UT 05:59

- re-started again the OB. Now it looks good in red side .. it looks like the red side went out of 
focus the previous time. From first images seeing is 5pix = 1.15 arcsec. Seeing getting pretty
after a few images .. 4.3 pixels in r-band ! getting some nice images now .. seeing monitor
says 2.2 arcsec. 

-- UT 06:23 

- Starting OB with V and I in red side, first to see if the I-band image is totally out of focus because
of the offset issue .. trying offsets, from 0.5mm to 0.45mm .. 0.47mm looked better. 

- Filter wheel problem changing to r-sloan to run focus OB .. UT 06:30 .. it works the third time. 
Now running focus OB .. big focus offset in both sides. 

-- UT 06:37 

- Start OB V+I .. showing elongated PSF in I-band .. probably offset is wrong again. New offset
of 0.4mm looks better. 

-- UT 06:47

- Finally started OB .. seeing looks very good, but images a little out of focus. Seeing around 1 arcsec, 
a little out of focus. 

-- UT 07:13 

- Moving to NGC2903 for galaxy monitoring. Turning camera on/off to load the new offsets of filters. 
Focusing .. seeing looks pretty good, images out of focus. 

-- UT 07:30 

- Started science exposures in NGC2903 using B+R filters. First image in R looks pretty good, 0.9 arcsec
seeing .. B looks bad, with seeing 1.5 arcsec, out of focus. Seeing holding up subarcsec in R, not very 
good in B. 

-- UT 08:10

- Focusing on MAX8 weeklensing cluster. Focus looks good after 2 iterations. Load OB and scaled the time 
to 0.1x original time (300 -» 30 sec) to see how good is the seeing/focusing. 

- Moved the offset of i-Sloan filter from 0.4mm -» 0.3mm it looks much better in the guide star. 
Red tracker stopped working .. reinitializing the camera (08:34). After reinitializing the camera
it seems to be working (08:45).

-- UT 08:50 

- Started OB, seeing looks very good in i-band, ~0.7 arcsec. In middle of first exposure we loose 
guiding/tracking and the images come out looking very bad. There is an error in the log analyzer 
about the controller error. 

-- UT 9:02 

- Started OB again, this time the guiding works well. The seeing still very good ~0.7 arcsec in i-band. 
However, blue side image doesn't look great and have to focus to see if it improves. Finally, restarted
OB once again, this time we are "sure" its in focus .. did two focusing iterations. Images don't look
good now .. there are cirrus over us and more coming in. Ended the cluster exposures because the 
seeing got too bad for the program. 

-- UT 09:40

- Moved to NGC4258 and made focus. 

-- UT 09:51

- Started science frames. In first exposure lost guiding due to clouds. Did NGC4258 through
thick clouds. 

-- UT 10:32 

- Doing focus in NGC4826. One focus iteration. 

-- UT 10:38 

- Getting science data. Seeing holding ~1 arcsec, focus got worse in B

-- UT 11:14 

- Slewing to M101 to do focus OB. Two focus sequences and it looks good. 
Start to observe the target at 11:25. Images look ok, background is very high
from the clouds (~15k counts), but seeing is good. 

-- UT 12:05 

- Closing up. Got 25 bias. Flats were not taken in the morning due to the clouds.


--- Jose