Date:
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Telescope:
CTIO Blanco 4-m
Submitter:
Guillermo Damke
Submitter Email:
Observer Support:
Hernan Tirado
Night Assistant:
Roberto Aviles
Also Present:
Rodrigo Hernandez, Hannah Crayton, Cesar Briceno (remotely)
Problems:
Guider not working as expected.
Around 3:40 am, the focus was not changing values after commanding a move in the newfirm GUI. A "Stop + Release" command in the f/8sec VNC fixed it.
Program:
Proposal:
NEWFIRM Engineering
Target of Oportunity:
No
Time Observed:
0.0
Time Engineering:
10.75
Time lost technical:
0.0
Time lost weather:
0.0
Time lost other:
0.0
Primary Investigator:
Guillermo Damke
Email:
Institution:
CTIO
Instrument:
CTIO 4m Newfirm
Organization:
NOAO
Total Program Time:
10.75
| Total Times | Time Observed | Time Engineering | Time lost technical | Time lost weather | Time lost other | Total Program Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-07-10 | 0.0 | 10.75 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 10.75 |
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In general, a good second night of testing AEON.
After pointing and focusing the instrument, we performed tests of the guider in case that John Bally wanted to use it in his run starting today. We started a dither sequence with a star in the guider, but the system could not follow it after offsets were applied. The night assistants tried to diagnose the issue with Omar Estay and Manuel Martinez after. Manuel would need to do some work during day time. Since it is unclear if the guider will be functional, I talked to John Bally (present in the control room) and decided to do 60-sec exposures (which will be later aligned in the reduction process), so we do not need to have a functional guider if the problem cannot be fixed. Next, we used some time to test exposure parameters for the broad and narrow band filters that Bally will use tomorrow.
After, we ran AEON and the system ran fine in general. Cesar inserted a Time Critical observation of the interstellar visitor C2025/ATLAS N1 and we found that the TCS is not accepting non-sidereal rates. Hannah already sent an email to Omar to discuss this problem tomorrow. We ended up taking exposures of this object with sidereal tracking.
We could insert a Rapid Response event to observe the ToO requested by Palmese. We completed 2 hours in Ks and did around 25 minutes of H band. However, the airmass started to increase and the star profiles looked out of focus (we stopped observations to check focus). At this point, we found out the error with focus not changing.
We resumed observations but AEON ran out of targets, so we performed a new focus sequence to estimate the best value with a temperature increase over a degree from the beginning of the night. We closed at 5:30am.