Nightlog 2010-11-29

SA: Steve
SO: Siphelo
Others: Hitesh

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Summary
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Closed for work on the apogee camera.

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Nightlog 2010-11-28

SA: Steve
SO: Siphelo
Others:

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Summary
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No observations due to weather

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Nightlog 2010-11-27

SA: Steve
SO: Siphelo
Others: Charl, Peter, Martin

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Summary
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Closed due to work on the tracker.

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Nightlog 2010-11-26

SA: Steve
SO: Siphelo
Others: Charl, Peter

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Summary
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We tried out some burst mirror tests for the IQ.

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Nightlog 2010-11-25

SA: Steve
SO: Siphelo
Others: David B., Martin, Charl, Peter, Patrick, Michelle, David E.

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Summary
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The primary mirror system had to be re-initialize at the beginning of
the night, and the seeing was around 2" throughout the night. We played
around with some imaging tests with Tracker Rho, but did not see any changes.

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Nightlog 2010-11-24

SA: Steve C.
SO: Siphelo
Others: David and guests

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Summary
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=> No observations tonight due to work on the payload.

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What's been happening up at SALT?!

"No news is good news" sums up the past few months...  The IQ blog may have dried up, but an awful lot's been happening, both at SALT & in Cape Town where people have been working on SALTICAM & some RSS bits.  Clearly it's time for an update :)

I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't taken any recent photos of the SALTICAM work, despite the fact that some very cool things have been happening - apologies to the devoted optics groupies out there!  In addition to all the other upgrades to the instrument, the integration of the autoguider required that the relevant lenses be transferred to a new rear barrel which will accommodate the additional hardware.

In testing the optics again afterwards (with the interferometer used for the SAC work,) some problems became apparent & Darragh found himself nursing a sequel to the SAC IQ drama.  Fortunately, with his black belt in Zemax & the help of Craig, Tim & Francois, SCAM's IQ problems proved no match for the instrument PI & the system was soon whipped into good alignment & the autoguider could be installed.

As for the action in Sutherland - a great deal of work's gone into every sub-system, including re-wiring the entire tracker, eliminating sources of heat within the telescope enclosure, improving the primary mirror alignment process, getting the payload re-organised &, of course, (all the king's horses & all the king's men) putting RSS back together again.  The payload was always a bit of a nightmare - here's an old pic of what it used to look like.

A nifty new electronics rack now takes care of all the major systems within the payload & will simplify life enormously for everyone concerned.

The finishing touches were being applied early last week.

Another addition to the payload is B-Cam, a backup acquisition camera.  The optics had been in hand for a while already, but the rest of the instrument could only be designed & manufactured post-IQ.  The new hardware was aligned last week & the Apogee CCD used for the IQ on-sky testing will be the detector.

In the RSS department: the instrument's really looking like a spectrograph again & Peter's thumb seems to be making an impressive recovery too :)  Before returning home from the SALT Board meeting, Ted spent some time checking out the Fabry-Perot side of things (the high resolution etalon's been repaired & is happy again). Then the Wisconsin team (Ken, Mike & Bill) established camp in the spectrometer room for a couple of weeks & worked through an extensive to-do list with Peter, Anthony & the rest of the gang.

Successful hardware interventions included extracting the air bubble in the collimator's lens fluid, sorting out mechanical clearance issues with the wave-plates, adjusting the alignment of the detector, fixing the sag in the camera articulation mechanism & baffling up as much of the camera system as possible.

A lot of progress was made on the software side as well, such as the development of auto-focus routines, the introduction of various checks to monitor & report on the status of different mechanisms & also to control the gratings, filters, wave-plates etc.  The overall level of user-friendliness has increased enormously since those dark early days of SALT spectroscopy!

Meanwhile, upstairs, the assembly holding the Apogee camera in place had to be removed from the payload so that the guys can access the Rho stage to go about fixing its wobble.

The flying saucer type contraption floated down elegantly...

& came in for a gentle landing down in the loading bay.

Then on Friday morning, the payload was rigged up & cleared for take-off.  Thanks to Janus for providing us with photos!

Vic courageously shouldered the responsibility of striking the technically-demanding Teapot pose during this delicate lifting procedure ;)

Jeremy Clarkson might ask: "How hard can it be?!"

Good job chaps, although now there's nowhere to sit inside the non-rotating structure anymore...

The "still to do" list consists of, amongst other things, testing the atmospheric dispersion compensator (ADC), completing the testing of SALTICAM, installing & aligning it within the payload (this will be done with the payload back down on the ground) & then once that's all back on the telescope, the spectrograph ought to be good to go up as well.  Lots happening & much exciting stuff to follow over the next few months :)

Nightlog 2010-11-23

SA: Alexei
SO: Patrick
Others: Steve, Siphelo

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Summary
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=> No IQ observations tonight because strong wind and bad seeing.

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Nightlog 2010-11-22

SA: Alexei
SO: Patrick
Others: Chris, Ardhisha, Jonathan and Don Pinnock for Getaway magazine.

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Summary
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=> No observations tonight because weather.

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Nightlog 2010-11-21

SA: Alexei
SO: Patrick
Others: Chris, Sharl

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Summary
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=> No observations tonight because weather

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Nightlog 2010-11-19

SA: Alexei
SO: Patrick
Others: Martin, Sharl, Jonathan

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Summary
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=> The payload (rotating structure) was successfully lifted today,
but there were problems with Dummy PFIS later.
For this reason installation of the VIS (Apogee camera)
was delayed.

We have got another problem with Apogee initialization where
Sharl and Jonathan were need to exchange some cables.
Finally this problem also was solved.

The weather was not very good with strong wind, clouds around
and high humidity.

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Nightlog 2010-11-18

SA: Alexei
SO: Patrick
Others:

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Summary
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=> Apogee camera is still off tonight.
No observations for this reason.

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Nightlog 2010-11-17

SA: Alexei
SO: Patrick
Others: Janus

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Summary
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=> Apogee camera is still off tonight.
No observations for this reason.

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Nightlog 2010-11-16

SA: Paul
SO: Zolisa
Others: Alexei, Ewald, Janus, Steve, Lisa, Mike, Bill, Ken, James

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Summary
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- Apogee camera is off tonight, but its no loss since the weather is bad.

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Nightlog 2010-11-15

SA: Paul
SO: Zolisa
Others: -

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Summary
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- We had bad seeing for most of the night. Wind direction changed just before 3
and the seeing improved, but not enough to start observations. Due to the bad
seeing conditions no data was taken tonight.

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more pointing data, please!

i finally went through the pointing data that petri took for me. as you can see from the plots below, there is definitely a significant cyclical error. this further confirms what i saw in the salticam data i analyzed as well as what amanda and i saw with the startracker data this past winter. this data is a bit cleaner, though. the top plot shows the altitude and azimuth residuals modeled with sines and cosines. the bottom plot shows the residuals from the tpoint analysis. here are the best-fit tpoint parameters (units are arcseconds):

1 IA +0.000 +438.59 21.765
2 IE -0.000 +81.29 13.257
3 AN -0.000 -136.51 14.616
4 AW -0.000 +392.59 14.501

Sky RMS = 82.03
Popn SD = 86.35

the terms IA and IE are basically encoder offsets while AN and AW are misalignments of the azimuth axis in the north-south and east-west directions, respectively. these numbers agree qualitatively with what i found with the salticam data in the sense that there's a significant axial misalignment of the order of 5-6 arcminutes. the measured amplitudes of AN and AW don't quite agree within the errors. also, the tpoint residual plots show some systematic errors in the residuals that are not being modeled (probably to do with the phase offset i found in my sin/cos fits).

the upshot is that i need more data. so if the seeing is not good enough to do IQ tasks, please take more pointing data for me. the more, the better. the procedure is pretty easy. pick catalog stars with good coordinates that have tracks as centered as possible. then tweak the telescope's pointing to place the star as close as possible to the position of the center of rotation. i believe petri determined this and it should be in the logs somewhere (near X=223, Y=273). once the star is there, take image and save the data. also remark in the log which images were used for pointing. seeing and focus can be bad. i only care that the star gets centered onto the center of rotation.

thanks,
tim

Nightlog 2010-11-14

SA: Paul
SO: Zolisa
Others: -

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Summary
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- We had bad seeing for most of the night. Wind direction changed just before 3
and the seeing improved, but not enough to start observations. Due to the bad
seeing conditions no data was taken tonight.

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Nightlog 2010-11-13

SA: Paul
SO: Zolisa
Others: Ewald, Marissa

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Summary
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- Tonight was plagued by bad and variable seeing.

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Nightlog 2010-11-12

SA: Paul
SO: Zolisa
Others: Ewald, Charl, Hitesh

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Summary
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- Seeing at the beginning of the evening was good according to timDIMM (<1'').
We had various issues with the MACS and the tracker. We made some observations
but they were all outside of the times we had ~1'' seeing. There were high level
clouds flying over during the whole night, which made matters more difficult.

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Nightlog 2010-11-11

SA: Paul
SO: Zolisa
Others: Ewald, Hitesh

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Summary
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- Strong wind, high humidity and clouds. Did not open.

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Nightlog 2010-11-10

SA: Paul
SO: Zolisa
Others: Hitesh, Charl

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Summary
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- We had spells of 1'' seeing tonight. Made some mirror burst observations when
the seeing was ~1.5 - 1.8'' and did a focus step observation during the good
seeing. We had some alignment problems at the start of the evening and the
evening ended with some issues with the tracker, during which we found
that the interferometer didn't have comms. We hope to have the same good seeing
tomorrow evening, but a little more constant.

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Nightlog 2010-11-09

SA: Petri
SO: Siphelo
Others: Paul, Zoliza, Ewald

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Summary
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- Did not open due to humidity

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Nightlog 2010-11-08

SA: Petri
SO: Siphelo
Others: Ken, Ramotholo and Willie with a Korean delegation

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Summary
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- Cloudy and humid, did not open.

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Nightlog 2010-11-07

SA: Petri
SO: Siphelo
Others: Tim, Ted

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Summary
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- Full night, continued pointing tests, for non-central tracker
positions this time. See notes.

- A spell of decent seeing, and attempted some IQ work as well:
best stars were 1.2-1.3" with the very noticeable comas
pointing down. See notes for more.

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Nightlog 2010-11-06

SA: Petri
SO: Siphelo
Others: Patrick, Tim, Ted, Jonathan

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Summary
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- Finished the pointing model observations started last night.

- Beautiful night, but poor seeing.

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Nightlog 2010-11-05

SA: Petri
SO: Siphelo
Others: Tim, Ted

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Summary
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- Seeing started very good (~1" on TimDimm), but we never saw
better than ~1.6" stars. Saved one sequence.

- Did a bunch of pointing model observations.

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Nightlog 2010-11-04

SA: Petri
SO: Siphelo
Others: Patrick, Janus, David, Chris, and members of SALT board

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Summary
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- Humid, did not open.

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Nightlog 2010-11-03

SA: Petri
SO: Siphelo
Others: Janus, Eben for a while

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Summary
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- Heavy clouds and humid, did not open.

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Nightlog 2010-11-02

SA: Alexei
SO: Patrick
Others: Petri, Siphelo, Ardhisha, Martin, Eben

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Summary
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=> SALT eng. team worked on tracker from the evening and finally
fixed it. But after that we have got problems with MACS during
the alignment and were need for more help.
All these problems also were solved and we have tried
to make some IQ tests.

Unfortunately, it was not very productive night ...

A lot of thanks to Ardhisha, Martin, Eben, Jonathan and Sharl for their help!

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Nightlog 2010-11-01

SA: Alexei
SO: Patrick
Others:Ardhisha

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Summary
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=> Some IQ observations tonight.
Seeing was around 1.8" and sometimes up to 1.2-1.3" in the
beginning of the night.
For this reason we make images for different rho to test
how IQ depends on it.

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Nightlog 2010-10-31

SA: Alexei
SO: Patrick
Others:

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Summary
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=> Some IQ observations during 2/3 of the night.
Seeing was around 1.8" and sometimes up to 1.5" during
the first half of the night.
For this reason we make images for different rho to test
how IQ depends on it.

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