OSU/RC Queue Observing UTC 2012 June 15 (civil date 2012 June 14/15) ======================================= Observers: R. Pogge (OSU), D. Berg (UM) Telescope Operator: S. Allanson Support Astronomer: O. Kuhn Support Tech: D. Officer Instrument: MODS + LBC Summary: Clear and warm, light wind (8m/s). Beautiful clear skies. The most photometric we've seen so far. Started out with good seeing, 0.5", but degraded to 1.5-2" at around 2am. Before dawn it settled down to 1" for the LBC observing, but it compromised the last MODS target. Seeing was the most variable tonight of the run to date. Had an AO2 RIP that had a difficult recovery, so much so we finally had to restart AOS and lost the preset. Used this opportunity to try out a new target slit alignment recovery procedure that worked very well. Olga documented it for the support astronomers, and Rick will look at ways to semi-automate it for MODS. Also tested a new abort exposure procedure that looks to clear up an issue with a clumsy and confusing abort mode experienced by some observers when aborting scripts in the middle of a multi-image sequence. Tested this while we were doing LBC observing at the end of the night, since the particular sloppy abort mode bit us during the night. Programs Executed: MODS: ND_N4013/n4103A UM_M101Stars OSU_CHAOS/NGC6946 Field 2 - aborted image 6/6 due to horrible seeing LBC: OSU_monitor/NGC6946b Details: All times are UTC unless otherwise noted ------- Startup 01:00 - side vent doors cracked open, except on the side facing into the wind (8m/s from SW, gusts to a little over 10m/s). 02:50 - pointing star, then a collimation star and waiting for the sky to get dark enough to start active optics. 03:10 - starting active optics GD140 - Standard Star - dual grating only, longslit 03:20 - starting acquisition 03:25 - starting obs script. Seeing 0.53" FWHM on acquisition image (2s) ND_N4013/n4013A - LongSlit dual grating 03:41 - starting acquisition using the HA+2.0 script. Does a blind offset, 60s integration to see the ref star. Seeing started to become unstable. Mean ~1" and a little puffy at times, contracting back to good. One of those nights? 03:52 - Starting observation, 3x1200s. Seeing 0.8" on the acquisition field image. Refstar was well-centered in the slit. 04:25 - seeing getting better now, whatever was passing over is gone. could be 0.7" during the second integration 04:40 - seeing poofing again, but not much. Seeing is good on the final image. Some elongation of the guide star along the slit, but we're not low enough to see atmospheric dispersion, not sure what is up with the active optics. UM_M101Stars Field 2 - MOS dual grating 05:00 - Starting acquisition. Because of the problems with the alignment stars I will align by hand using the targets and science slits. 05:18 - Starting the observation. May be a little field rotation that I can't do by hand (don't want to try), but we see stars in all of the slits. Enough to get spectra with only minor losses on a few. Seeing is good (0.8") but variable, so it will likely average out. Best I can do without a more sophsticated set of tools on the fly. 05:43 - Took off -0.1" of X shift between 1st and 2nd exposures. This mitigates a mistake of sending 1.6 instead of 1.5" dx in my by-hand shift. I did not noticed the mistake until we were committed well into image 1 of the 4. It should made little difference when I blinked images 1 and 2... 06:16 - AO2 Shell RIP during image 3. Pausing the exposure while Steve tries to recover, exptime ~740s into the 1200s. Steve not getting traction, it is not a normal RIP as before. Getting Juan Carlos on the phone, he'll login from Tucson and do the recovery from there. 06:34 - Restarting AOS as part of this recovery cancelled the preset. We stopped exposure and read out what we had (759s red, 740s blue). While Steve is getting things back on their feet, we are setting up to recover the target, trying a new recover procedure (see IssueTrak 4002 for details). 06:37 - Made a recover.acq to re-do the preset, execute the offset from above, then take a thru-slit confirmatory image. We had a longer than usual wait because things were way out of wack with AO2 and Steve had to remove AO corrections and let it iterate to convergence which takes many more iterations (like at the start of a night). 06:45 - Recovery complete - stars look close to where they were in the slits. Starting a final 1200s exposure using a recover.obs script we wrote from the old .obs script. OSU_CHAOS/NGC6946_Field2 - MOS dual grating 07:08 - Starting acquisition. 07:21 - starting observations - 6x1200s. Seeing ~1" at start, then got very puffy for a lot of image 1 of 6. 07:49 - seeing a lot better during image 2 of 6. 08:04 - azimuth power amplifier failure just as image 2 was starting readout. preset lost. Building recover.acq using mods_lastOffset to recover preset and mask alignment... 08:09 - beginning recover.acq to redo preset 08:13 - started recover.obs to do 4x1200s. Total time lost 9 minutes. First image open-shutter at 08:15, minor glitch cost 1min 08:50 - seeing blowing up again during image 4 then settling down. variable is a nice way of describing it. DIMM says 1.2" 09:16 - seeing is degraded and not recovering. We're committed (near end of run and no other programs at this time). Humidity has been steadily rising all night, now near 60%(!). With T dropping, left primary has 0.5C gradient across the diameter. Ugh! 09:21 - aborted image 5 of 6, no point in pressing on. Wolf1346 - Standard Star dual grating longslit 09:22 - acquiring target, long slew to target, though... 09:29 - starting obs script, seeing 1.5 to 2". Steve declares it "disgusting". That's a polite way to put it. ============================================================================= LBC Observing 09:42 - started reconfiguring scope for LBC 09:57 - reconfiguration done OSU_monitor/NGC6946B - 10:00 - Preset to target for focus and range balance 10:12 - Starting imaging OB for N6946 10:20 - Taking images of NGC6946, seeing 1". Now it gets better... 10:48 - Done. We're 18min past 18-degree twilight and out of targets we are done. ============================================================================ Calibrations LBC: Binobias, but had to restart blue part way through, trying power cycling. MODS: 8K Biases, basic calibs from previous days.