At the beginning of science observations, the guider follow sequence was not working properly. We called Omar and he worked with Manuel and Leo and showed them how to get this working. The proceedures for doing this should be written down so that TelOps staff have the necessary documentation.
We performed a zero point at the beginning of the night. For the first few objects we observed, the desired target was within ~30" from the slit center. As the night progressed, the position of the target became steadily worse with the target more than 100" from the slit position. The pointing/location of the object was noticably worse in RA (> 100" offsets) but reasonable in Dec (< 5" offsets). We did not perform a new zero point during the night. It may solve the problem.
Around 4am local time, Leo noticed that the recorded dewar temperature for COSMOS on the NMSL Console was approaching 260K. We went to zenith and refilled the dewar. Current dewar temperature is 145K. Can somebody please check the dewar pressure in the morning to make sure that we did not lose the vacuum? The dewar temperature is not recorded in the FITS headers and the only place to find it is on the nmsl console. The people in Tucson responsible for the software need to be contacted to change this and maybe flash a warning message if the dewar temperatue exceeds some value. We may also want the headers to store the seeing value reported by the seeing monitor.
As David mentioned in one of his TripleSpec4 EON reports, it would be nice for the operators to have a parallactic angle calculator on the TCS GUI.
| Total Times | Time Observed | Time Engineering | Time lost technical | Time lost weather | Time lost other | Total Program Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-07-02 | 0.0 | 11.25 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 11.25 |
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Obtained spectra of stars with 11 <= Vmag < 17 with exposure times of 60s, 300s, and 600s. These will be compared to the grid of S/N calculations that Frank Valdes made using a test COSMOS ETC. The stars were selected from Hamuy et al and the McCook and Sion WD catalog. The finding charts from the McCook & Sion catalog may be in error because some of the spectra did not appear to be WD spectra.
I also worked on the COSMOS acquisition script. The current script will determine the initial offset and then prompt the user to take additional images. The observer does not have to start any new scripts, they are now successfully called from within the offset script. The observer is only prompted to reply "yes" or "no" if another image is desired. I tried to test performing the offsets directly from the script. This failed, but I think I have a path to an inelegant solution.
During the afternoon, I installed the HgNe penray that Nicole loaned me from the LS optics lab. Upon looking at those spectra, it may be preferrable to use the HgNe penray instead of the HgAr penray. The data will need to be analyzed before we make that decision.