Team Dånkström Run 2 (July 21 - July 25)

Post date: Jul 22, 2016 1:31:6 AM

7/21/16

Water: Initial water level was 16 in.

Weather: Very cloudy in the early evening. Cleared up enough to take a lot of great evening twilight flats, but clouds rolled in again before it was dark enough to take science images. Closed the dome around 11pm, rain started about an hour later.

Issues: 

11:01pm: When changing filter, filter wheel interface becomes unresponsive and buttons are greyed out and unclickable. Issue fixed by disconnecting from filter in Evora and reconnecting. 

Output from filter wheel issue saved to text file on desktop of Loki.

Bummer alert: Nick got really sick the first night, and couldn't find any Tylenol or cold medicine at MRO. Might be worth keeping a supply of for situations like this.

7/22/16

Water: Water level at 13 in.

Weather: Mostly clear skies all night, a few clouds rolled through later in the night. High winds. 

Data: Took exposures for RR Lyrae and Eclipsing Binary images for first half of night, as well as a few glamor shot images.

Issues:

9:21pm: Same filter wheel issue. Fixed by disconnecting from the filter wheel and reconnecting.

9:29pm: Same issue, fixed with same method.

~2am: Realized that all of the science images we'd taken were in the i filter not r. Whoops.

7/23/16

Water: Water level at 11 in.

Weather: Clear.

Issues: 

Noticed a tiny issue with the filter wheel software: says "Adjusting fitler," when rotating. Filter is spelled wrong, the l and t are switched.

7/24/16

Water: Water level at 10 in.

Weather: Clear again!

Issues: 

9:02pm: Had to reconnect to filter wheel. Happens often during flats when you're switching the filter wheel regularly.

9:06pm: Same issue with filter server. Failed to home, homed again and it worked.

12:22am: Evora crashed mid exposure. Restarted the software and reconnected to camera and filter server. The exposure didn't complete, so we took it again.

1:17am: Position was not aligned. Manually corrected coordinates from previous night. This seems to happen later in the night as the telescope gets west of zenith.

2:20am: Took a few exposures in 1x1 binning instead of 2x2. If you're switching back and forth, make sure to double check before returning to science images.

7/25/16

Water: Final water level at 9 in.

Other notes: We fixed the sink, so it should stay attached now. No issues with the toilets or sinks in the bathrooms, the plumbing issue seems to be fixed.