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Summary
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- Clear night but the seeing was ~2'' most of the time. We did some more
stepping through focus observations since we could not do anything else. At the
beginning of the night Francois, Hitesh and Darragh did some tests with SPIFFY.
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Summary
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- The seeing at the beginning of the night was not very good. Darragh and his
team of helpers went up to the CCAS to check the mirror alignment with spiffy.
He suggested we take some images through focus after they were done with their
tests. Got a sequence of images after looking around for a suitable target. Had
a tracker error during the last observation and closed up after that.
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Summary
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- Did not open, strong wind, high humidity and cloud.
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Summary
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- Cloudy night, didn't open.
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Summary
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- Cloudy night, didn't open.
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Summary
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- Night claimed by rising humidity. No data.
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Summary
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- Nice stable night, but seeing not great. Did Rho-tests in
the early part. Did not see any clear evidence of
Rho-dependent image quality with ~1.4-1.6 arcsec stars.
The V-filter definitely produces rounder stars than the white
light when I was last up.
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Summary
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. Did not open due to bad weather: rain and completely cloudy.
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Summary
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. We opened at the beginning of the night, aligned mirrors, and
started a track. We took one set of images at moderate to bad seeing
(2-3"). By 21:20 we were forced to close due to high humidity and low
T-dp.
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Summary
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. Clear skies at night start, but high humidity forced us to close
before we could take data.
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Summary
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. Did not open. Conditions were not good for IQ testing: clouds
in the early part of the night were followed by bad transparency and
high seeing.
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Summary
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. Closed all night due to clouds.
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Summary
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. No data tonight. Too cloudy to get anything worthwhile for IQ.
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Summary
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Closed all night: too windy at beginning of night to open and align,
then high humidity & low T-dp.
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Summary
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High winds (>60 kph) and dust precluding opening, though it was clear.
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Summary
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After Clear, wind NW starting quite high (40 kph), low RH (14-20%),
moderate to poor seeing (TimDIMM ~2"), but got a little better at times.
More successful IQ tests over az. ranges & long tracks. IQ stable,
consistent and uniform over FoV.
Some nice long tracks of SMC with nice uniform IQ.
Some tweaking of phi/theta coll. offsets improved images in pupil. Seems
to be generally higher phi (~50") than the canonical (10").
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Summary
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Clear, wind W (24 kph), low RH (14%), moderate seeing (TimDIMM 1.7",
typically 0.3" higher than reported by 1.9-m, which is probably expected
due to being at ground level). Conditions very stable all night.
Pretty successful night in terms of telescope performance,
notwithstanding issues at the end with interferometer/tracker datasocket
comms. error and BMS deciding to close the louvres.
Got through many targets spread in azimuth and results essentially the
same: no field dependencies seen. Did find that tweaking phi offset to a
higher value than nominal (i.e. up to 50" or 60") was required to
balance pupil illum. All tracks at variety of Decs and azimuths all
finished successfully, within few mins of predictions. Pointing seems to
be consistently in Apogee "tile #2" field, i.e. consistently in upper
middle part of CCD (i.e. mostly offset in altitude).
Tried some long tracks to see how IQ held: essentially kept consistent
values all through the tracks (at various azimuths). Image FWMHs varied
from 1.5-2" throughout night, which was consistent with DIMM.
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Summary
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Clear, wind NW (20-30 kph), low RH (15-20%), moderate seeing (1.7")
All went very well.
Many repeat focus, phi, theta variations. Loads of data.
All looked very repeatable, uniform and no hint of field dependencies.
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Summary
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Clear at sunset. wind SE and R.H. incr from 45%.
Initial hiccups with getting CCAS (datasocket issue?) going.
Seeing bad atnever better than 2" (TimDIMM)& similar best focus values
with Apogee.
Incr. humidity, dew point & ridge cloud killed us.
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Summary
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Clear at sunset.
Initial hiccups: comms with VI stage & interferometer, OPT not loading
to schedule
Looked at OOF images & affect of changing phi & theta
Seeing never better than 2" (TimDIMM)& similar best focus values with
Apogee.
Incr. humidity, dew point & ridge cloud killed us.
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Summary
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- Cloudy at the start, clearing partially by midnight, cloudy again by ~3:30
- Seeing 2.0 - 2.5", so not really useful for IQ
- Images looked the same over all 9 VI positions
- Hint that images at bottom of Apogee slightly comatic, but not so much
at the top?
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Summary
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- Did not open, cloudy=20
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Summary
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- We did some more out of focus tests to see if the get the same variation =
in
flux distribution over the VI stage.
- We found that that auto collimator has been very stable and we detected no
drift which could have been one of the explanations for the observed images=
.=20
- Hitesh came out to have a look at the images we were getting and agrees t=
hat
all is not right. We are speculating that its a mis-aligned VI stage. This
might have occurred when it was put back after the rho ring measurements. We
will only know for sure when the guys come up tomorrow night to check the VI
stage alignment.
- We closed early, we can't do any IQ with the current aberrations. =C2=A0=
=20
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Summary
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- Opened with thin cloud around, conditions was not photometric.=20
- Attempted to re-obtain the ghost images found previously from a low track,
but the missing two rows of mirrors made that a bit tricky.=20
- The seeing was too bad for IQ, we are still waiting to see if the elongat=
ed
images were due to atmospheric dispersion.=20
- The variation of the out of focus flux distribution across the VI stage is
still puzzling.=20
- The night was cut short due to cloud.=20
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Summary
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- We waited for the engineering team to align the VI stage and
put the Apogee camera back. They did a good job of centering the camera.
- The seeing was variable, fluctuating between 1'' and 4'' but staying around
2'' for most of the night.
- Seeing was not good enough for IQ testing, but we checked how far off centre
the X0;Y0 VI stage is. Found it to be within ~30'' from the centre of the focal
plane.
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Summary
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- Lots of pointing tests during the night, see notes and comments below.
- Could not test IQ because of bad conditions.
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