Team 1 - The Hour Angels (6/29 - 7/02)

Post date: Jul 03, 2017 8:29:55 PM

Water level upon arrival: ~60% full 

Events: Power outage! We lost power for about 6-7 hours on Saturday (07/01). This was the first power outage at MRO with a 481 group -- so we were a little thrown off. After a power outage an alarm from the UPS in the dome will sound for about ~20 mins. This is roughly the amount of time you have of back-up power to allow time to shut down the camera and telescope safely. We didn't know this of course, so the telescope and camera were shut down incorrectly and gave us some real issues after the power came on and observing time came. 

Solutions: The first issue we encountered after restarting the computers was connecting the camera. We contacted Tristan who updated the documentation and we were able to connect just fine. We were then instructed to take a bias, which Oliver said would be unusual -- probably due to reconnecting/camera temperature. Our first test bias was indeed oversaturated-- the issue was once it came time to take twilight flats our bias mean count was STILL completely saturated.  We contacted Tristan over Skype after several attempts of restarting Evora and power cycling the camera didn't work.  There is no clear method to our madness-- Tristan reinstalled the drivers and reinitialized the camera from his end several times. We restarted Evora and power cycled a couple more times and eventually the camera returned a decent bias that was not over saturated. By this time we missed twilight flat time and ended up taking morning flats (yay!) All in all we were still able to collect our data (Landolt field) and got the flats we needed by sunrise. 

Groceries: microwave popcorn, tons of tortilla chips, a fresh onion, pretzels, a ton of drinking water ~13.5 gallons, plenty of cooking oil, condiments (mustard, mayo, ketchup, relish), spices, coffee, full carton of eggs (should be fresh for awhile), salsa, ranch, BBQ sauce, butter, tortillas. 

Needed Supplies: new mop, chip clips would be nice, plastic knives.