Team Dånkström Run 1 (June 30 - July 4)

Post date: Jul 01, 2016 11:5:55 PM

6/30/2016

Water: Initial water level was 24 in.

Weather: Clear skies all night! We were able to observe our target for Project 1 through g, r, and i filters throughout the night. We also observed all of the targets for Project 2 and determined accurate, precessed coordinates. There were a few thin, passing clouds later in the night but no interruption to our observation. Somewhat strong winds from the west.

Issues: Difficulties arose when trying to take evening twilight flats. Switching filters when ssh'd into the filter wheel computer somehow caused half of the resulting flat images to have 0 counts (the image was cut unevenly in two). Homing the filter wheel to Hα resolved the issue, but only for the Hα filter. Switching to any other filter appeared to "block" half of the image. The filter wheel was removed fully and manually aligned, which did not resolve the issue when switching filters. A hard reset of the Loki computer and Evora software resolved the problem, which seems to indicate that the issue was in the software.

When taking morning twilight flats, we encountered another error with the Evora software. Between observations, the Evora input fields became unresponsive and the UI encountered some graphics errors. The temperature status indicator shifted left, and the Evora quit prompt was an empty window. We force quit Evora (following the Evora documentation) and restarted, but it was unable to connect to the camera. A hard reset of the Loki computer and Evora software resolved the issue and we were able to get morning twilight flats.

Other Notes: The telescope was already on (and parked) when we arrived at MRO.

7/01/2016

Water: Water level at 22 in.

Weather: Much cloudier than previous night. Mostly thin clouds along the horizon. Clear near the zenith for most of the night. 

Issues: Evora crashed four times tonight. Same issues as previous night, temperature indicator moved left and fields became unresponsive. To kill Evora, we used the following commands from the Evora documentation:

        ps -ef | grep 'evora_server_link'

This returns a PID for the Evora server process. The first number is the PID you want.

        kill -9 <PID>

In place of <PID>, enter the number returned by the previous command. Now repeat the commands to kill the GUI as follows:

        ps -ef | grep 'photoAcquisitionGUI'

        kill -9 <PID>

Again, <PID> should be replaced by the first number returned by the ps command. Evora was unable to connect to the camera after relaunching, but worked fine after restarting the Loki computer. The telescope also became unresponsive at one point. One of the slew buttons on the control panel in the telescope room was pushed while the telescope was slewing to a new location. Because the telescope received two commands at once, it stopped moving and the GTCC interface was unresponsive. Two of the LEDs under the the RA skirt turned red. To fix this, we restarted the GTCC software and the telescope, and then manually returned the telescope to zenith. After that, the telescope was working fine.

7/02/2016

Water: Water level at 19 in.

Weather: Cloudy when getting setup and dome open, but clear skies from 10:45pm - 1:30am. After that, clouds rolled in and we were unable to take more data.

Issues: Repeat of issues with filter wheel. When taking evening twilight flats, the left half of the image through the i filter had significantly lower counts than the right half of the image. Homing resolved the issues but still only for the Hα filter. Restarting Evora and Loki did not resolve the issues. We were able to get good images through all filters after restarting Loki again and opening the filter wheel and confirming by eye that it was lined up. We're still unsure exactly what step resolves the issue, so we'll carefully take one step at a time if the problem appears again.

7/03/2016

Water: Water level at 18 in.

Weather: Mostly cloudy during the night. There were thin, wispy clouds when doing twilight flats, then a thick cloud bank rolled in. We were able to get sporadic exposures through the clouds, but many of them had visible clouds.

Issues: Continued troubleshooting issue of edge effects on the left side of images. We started early to trouble shoot issues, and the black bar on the left side of the CCD started to appear early in the afternoon. We took a series of many test flats (labeled in the directory as testflat_filter_001...) making incremental changes to exposure times and readout rates. A log of our notes and the outputs from Evora and the filter wheel server are found in .txt files named FilterWheelEvoraEventLog.txt and FilterWheelOutput.txt in the directory for our 4th night (20160704).

7/04/2016

Water: Water level at 15 in.

Things to buy: Paper towels, plaster utensils, paper bowls.