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Summary
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- Full night lost to humidity and clouds.
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Summary
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- A few offset tests in the beginning, most of the night
lost to humidity.
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Summary
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got almost 2 hours work of open loop tracking data pointing south. would b=
e good to do the same at some point for E, W, and N tracks. ridge cloud go=
t to us around 1 AM.
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Summary
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OPTI wasn't working so took some data to try and measure open-loop tracking=
performance. had to close a couple hours early due to high humidity.=20=
=20
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Summary
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Some pointing test data taken at start of night (5 x 10 degree steps in
azimuth).
Enveloped by ridge cloud before midnight.
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Summary
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No observations tonightdue to thick cloud, lightning and high humidity.
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Summary
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No observations tonight.
Opened briefly, but had to close due to high humidity during initial
alignment.
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Summary
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Rained most of the night - did not open.
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Summary
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- Heavy rain the whole day and most of the night. Did not open.
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Summary
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- Very strong winds at the start of the evening. We had some rain later on. Did
not open due to the bad weather. Spend some time on the RSS tests.
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Summary
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- Made some auto collimator observations. We closed due to high humidity. Had
some time outside to enjoy the Geminids.
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Summary
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- Did some theta phi tests and got more pointing model data. Seeing was not
good enough for IQ. We didn't have any A-G motor issues tonight thanks to Eben
and Keith.
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Summary
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- The night started with some technical issues. We had a TPC actuator comms
error which was resolved by rebooting the TPC machine. The A-G motor overheated
early in the evening. We did not open due to the strong wind and high
humidity. Ridge cloud just before midnight.
- Did some of the RSS tests.
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Summary
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Bad seeing and thickening clouds precluded any really useful on-sky work.
Did make progress on defining relative positions of camera.
RSS flexure tests done.
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Summary
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BCAM FLI focuser mechanism tried out.
Focus offsets for V-CAM & B-CAM determined
Tracker anti-g & y drive motors overheating and control saturation of
interferometer plagued us.
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Summary
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Successfully got both B-CAM (Big Apogee camera) and VI-CAM (small Apogee
camera) running together. Control of B-CAM now done on newly constructed
(thanks Hamish & Simon) BCAM PC, which can (in principle, once we know
how) run the FLI focuser, independent of tel. focus.
Current focus offset between the two cameras is ~1.5mm.
Had tracker failure (abnormal end) when hexapods flat-lined & radio
plugs pulled, plus the good old brakes release error, previously
attributed to interference and cured. Also seemed to be a problem with
overheating of anti-gravity motor, which was in excess of 30 deg.
Tracker recovered by Peter & Charl, who also bled the glycol to bring
the temp down.
Lots of fiddling to get a decent focus on VI-CAM, but not really a great
success for some reason TBD.
Some RSS grating flexure tests done during tracker fix.
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Summary
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First light (second time around) with BVIT! We took some images,
identified orientation and offset from BCAM, and are still working out
instrument kinks.
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Summary
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Had a rocky start to the night, with a power failure and difficulty
connecting to the BVIT computer. Using BACM, we took IQ data of a
burst mirror for Darragh and then high-seeing pointing data for Tim.
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Summary
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Clear at start of night, last half lost due to high humidity. Data
taken for IQ and pointing tests.
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Summary
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Beautiful night, with high humidity forcing closure just before
morning twilight. Took data to calibrate Luis' BCAM/SALTICAM software,
data for Darragh's "haze" test, some IQ data, and pointing data for
Tim.
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Summary
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Most of the night was lost due to high humidity. Took a few frames to
test BCAM/SALTICAM software.
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Summary
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High humidity claimed most of the night. We got just a few BCAM
images.
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Summary
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First light on BCAM! We battled with clouds, a tracker failure, and
were able to only take a few frames before closing due to high
humidity.
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Summary
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Some image quality observations and testing of the facilities. Thanks
to the engineers for their hard work and effort for getting everything
working tonight!
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