Night Log 2012-04-29

SA: Petri
SO: Fred
Others: Charl. Valerio, Matthew, Suzie visit

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Cloudy beginning, then many hours of good sky, then lost
last stretch to technical issues. Data for:

2011-3-RSA_UKSC-001
2011-3-POL-007
2011-3-GU-001
2011-3-UW-004 (MOS)

Night Log 2012-04-28

SA: Petri
SO: Fred
Others: Charl

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- Got two partially successful blocks done during a
mostly cloudy night. Some technical trouble too.
data were for:

2011-3-GU-001
2011-3-RSA_UKSC_HET_OTH-001

Night Log 2012-04-27

SA: Petri
SO: Fred
Others:

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Another night lost to high humidity.

Night Log 2012-04-26

SA: Petri
SO: Fred
Others: Charl, Matthew, Jonathan visit

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All night lost to rain and clouds

Night Log 2012-04-24

SA: Tim
SO: Patrick
Others: fred, petri, charl, chris

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fought through cirrus all night and a few technical issues at times, but otherwise a reasonably productive night and mostly smooth in the 2nd half. acquired data for the following programs:

2011-3-UW_DC-001 (3 blocks)
2011-3-RSA_UKSC-002
2011-3-RSA-001 (fabry-perot)
2011-3-RSA_UKSC_OTH-003
2011-3-HET_GU-001
2011-3-GU-001

Night Log 2012-04-23

SA: Tim
SO: Patrick
Others: deon, charl

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the humidity held off a while longer tonight, but did eventually shut us down at 02:00. prior to that we managed to complete two blocks for 2011-3-UW_DC-001, two blocks for 2011-3-RU-003, and one for 2011-3-RSA_UKSC_HET_OTH-001. after we closed we ran the PDET gain.calib routine for all four gain/speed settings.

Night Log 2012-04-22

SA: Tim
SO: Patrick
Others: charl, peter

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clear and markedly colder night with frost and below freezing temps after midnight. managed to squeeze in two blocks for 2011-3-UW_DC-001 before the humidity got too high. did some closed-dome F-P tests afterwards. the sharp drop in temperatures apparently upset the etalons. they are definitely in a different state from a couple nights ago and the MR etalon would keep overloading unless i tweaked the manual fine settings down a little bit (from 600 to 560).

Night Log 2012-04-21

SA: Tim
SO: Patrick
Others: deon

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managed to squeeze in one P1 block for 2011-3-RSA-019 before humidity forced us to close for the rest of the night. got some dark frames to help measure cosmic ray rates in SCAM and RSS.

Night Log 2012-04-20

SA: Tim
SO: Patrick
Others: charl, deon, hamish, peter

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what began as a stormy evening gave way to a stable night with scattered clouds from time to time and decent seeing. lost some time at the beginning to alignment issues and then a couple hours to the slitmask mechanism getting very confused. in spite of that data was obtained for the following programs:

2011-3-RSA_OTH-024
2011-3-UW-002
2011-3-RSA_OTH-002
2011-3-RSA-003
2011-3-RSA_OTH-006
2011-3-RSA_UKSC_OTH-003
2011-3-POL-008

also obtained some gain calibration data for RSS in the early evening.

Night Log 2012-04-19

SA: Tim
SO: Patrick
Others: deon, janus, ant

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attempted a couple of observations for 2011-3-UW-001 and 2011-3-RSA-022, but were scuttled by poor stack and then clouds and later on some rain.

straightened out the main issue with SALTICAM slit view focus. also did some F-P engineering to check parallelism and worked on developing an automated script for measuring parallelism offsets.

Night Log 2012-04-18

SA: Tim
SO: Patrick
Others:

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mostly clear night with high humidity for much of it. snuck in some observations in the beginning for:

2011-3-RSA-019 (not a full track)
2011-3-POL-004 (lost time to non-sidereal coordinate bugs)

humidity crashed back down at the end as the temperature inversion finished setting up, but too late to get back on sky and have enough time to carry out a program.

Night Log 2012-04-17

SA: Alexei
SO: Siphelo
Others: Charl as SO, Tim

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=> Cloudy night with moderate seeing. Closed by humidity in the second half.

=> Data were taken for some programs:
2011-3-POL-006
2011-3-RSA-021
2011-3-DC-006
2011-3-GU-002
2011-3-POL-001

Night Log 2012-04-16

SA: Alexei
SO: Siphelo
Others:

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=> Some clouds during all the night. Very few from the evening around of horizon,
and much more during second half of the night.

=> Data were taken for these programs:
2011-3-DC-006
2011-3-POL-001
2011-3-POL-004
2011-3-RSA_POL_OTH-001

Night Log 2012-04-15

SA: Alexei
SO: Siphelo
Others:

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=> Clear night with very good seeing at the beginning and much worse during the second half.

=> Some data were taken for the next programs:
2011-3-RSA_POL_OTH-001
2011-3-RSA-020
2011-3-RSA_UKSC_HET_OTH-001
2011-3-RSA-022

Night Log 2012-04-14

SA: Alexei
SO: Siphelo
Others:

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=> No observations tonight, because weather

=> SALTICAM filters repeat tests

=> Test #5c,d to test PG900 alignment

Night Log 2012-04-13

SA: Alexei
SO: Siphelo
Others:

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=> Very unstable weather during this night with a lot of passing clouds

=> Some data for these programs were taken:
2011-3-UKSC-003
2011-3-POL-007
2011-3-RSA_POL_OTH-001
2011-3-POL-005
2011-3-POL-001
2011-3-RSA-020

Night Log 2012-04-12

SA: Alexei
SO: Siphelo
Others:

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=> Clear night with better seeing at the beginning of the night and worse at the end.

=> Data were taken for the next programs:
2011-3-UW_OTH-001
2011-3-RSA-003
2011-3-RSA_POL_OTH-001
2011-3-DC_RSA-001
2011-3-RSA_OTH-002
2011-3-POL-001
2011-3-RSA-020
2011-3-RSA-026

=> Data for SALTICAM internal focus tests

Night Log 2012-04-11

SA: Alexei
SO: Siphelo
Others: Amanda G., Johan, Jonathan, Martin, Chris

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=> did not open tonight due to the tracker Lower X motor+gearbox problems.

=> Clear night with bad seeing

Night Log 2012-04-08

SA: Paul
SO: Zolisa
Others:

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- night lost to bad weather. we had high winds, rain and a bit of snow.

Night Log 2012-04-07

SA: Paul
SO: Zolisa
Others: Rudi

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- entire night lost to bad weather

Night Log 2012-04-04

SA: Paul
SO: Siphelo
Others: Amanda G, Eben, Johan, Kobus, Jonathan, Rudi

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- did not open tonight due to the tracker x motor issues.
- weather was ok-ish until 02:00 then ridge cloud arrived.

Night Log 2012-04-03

SA: Tim
SO: Patrick
Others: dave b, paul k, marissa k, deon & guests

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entire night lost to tracker EPIC FAIL! got a little bit of F-P engineering done and showed the young padawan some of the F-P ropes.

Night Log 2012-04-02

SA: Tim
SO: Patrick
Others: karel klein and students, dave b

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another beautiful clear night. things chugged along smoothly until the tracker failed shortly before midnight. turned out to be a failed clutch which prevented the X axis from slewing. we were able to salvage a couple more hours to do some closed-loop tracking tests, but the tracker failed in another way shortly after 03:00. hopefully the crew can sort the clutch issue out during the day because the forecast is good, weather-wise.

managed to get data for the following programs:

2011-3-RU-003 (good seeing, accepted)
2011-3-RSA_OTH-025 (accepted)
2011-3-POL-006 (partially accepted; didn't get full track)
2011-3-UW_OTH-003 (rejected due to tracker failure; only got standard star)

Night Log 2012-04-01

SA: Tim
SO: Patrick
Others: dave b

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clear, stable night with excellent seeing at times, though poor at the beginning. acquired quite a significant amount of data. 681 saved frames from salticam and another 896 from RSS. that'll keep the network link to town pretty busy this morning....

acquired data for the following programs:

2011-3-RU-003 (rejected because IQ degraded significantly)
2011-3-RSA_OTH-025 (rejected due to IQ issues first track and payload issues 2nd track)
2011-3-RSA-022
2011-3-POL-007
2011-3-RSA_UKSC-001
2011-3-RSA-022 (rejected when tracker failure ruined last 15 minutes of track)

Night Log 2012-03-31

SA: Tim
SO: Patrick
Others: buckley family

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exquisite photometric night with mostly sub-arcsecond seeing. completed all of the remaining 2011-3 observations including MOS. nothing left to observe so heading out to spend rest of run on the beach.