#nofilter 07/25/19 - 07/29/19

Post date: Jul 29, 2019 12:34:51 PM

ASTR 481.

Facility Issues

- PLUUUUUMMMMBBBBBIIIIIIINNNNNNNNGGGGGGG

- Toilets stopped flushing Friday (??) night, and giant sewage puddle formed in water room. Oliver will get a plumber on the job so team Cornstellation doesn't feel our pain. The problem is (Oliver said) likely caused by some kind of clog that causes slow and (intermittent ??) draining.

- However, Oliver taught us a procedure that so far has been temporarily fixing the plumbing issue. Involves shoving some BioClean down the access pipe outside the observatory near the bathroom wall and waiting a few hours without flushing. We also tried Liquid Plumbr down

the shower drains (+ hot water) but we are unsure if it helped. We ended up using only BioClean and it continued to temporarily fix the plumbing problem. Important things to remember: do not use BioClean at the same time as Liquid Plumbr because the Liquid Plumbr will kill the bacteria in BioClean.

Observing Issues

- Evora GUI crashed once during the trip (Friday or Saturday night). We had to kill the GUI manually using kill -9 command (refer to team Cornstellation's last log for more detail) because the GUI would not respond to the red X button.

- A few times during the trip, Evora GUI would close randomly while taking images. We simply opened Evora GUI again immediately, reconnected to everything (camera, filter wheel) and it seemed to work fine afterwards.

- On Friday night, seeing was not horrible (~3-4 in FWHM), but for some stars the counts in IRAF radial profiles were much lower than the previous night for some reason. Extremely low, like ~1000 counts for 30-60 second exposures.

We didn't see any major clouds happening, so it wasn't too clear what caused the issue.

- Saturday night, seeing was pretty bad (minimum around 5, usually around 6-7) and again counts tended to be low even for long exposure times. Also, around 3 AM the sky was entirely clear except for a single strip of cloud blocking most of our objects. Nice...

- However, we made a deal to ensure that our seeing would drastically improve the next night. And it did.

- On Monday morning, around 12:50 AM - while taking images (which was going smoothly), Evora suddenly and inexplicably stopped saving the images in the correct directory on Loki. They ended up on Heimdall instead. We called Oliver around 2 AM and he fixed the problem for us.

There seemed to have been a background process on Evora that popped up and screwed around; it must have been Loki, the God of Mischief being mischievous. Oliver killed the process and the subsequent images began saving in the correct spot, and everything was peachy afterwards. 

Food Remaining

    Fridge

        - Peach syrup

        - A bit of maple syrup

        - Milk (2 partially empty jugs - expiration dates of Aug 2 and Aug 7)

        - Blueberries

        - Ice cream

        - Pickles

        - Condiments

        - Tortillas

        - Lunch meat

        - One giant lime

        - A bell pepper

        - Lettuce

        - Mandarin oranges

        - Yellow mustard

        - Apples (2)

        - Apricot preserves

        - Sour cream

        - Soy sauce

        - Chili garlic sauce

        - Ketchup (we used a lot)

        - Cappuccino

        - Olive oil mayo

        - Half stick butter

        - Spreadable butter

        - Salad dressing

        - Picante sauce

        - Sauerkraut

        - Hot sauce

        - Salsa

        - Sesame ginger

        - Romani caesar

        - Marinara sauce

        - Parmesan cheese

        - One small blueberry yogurt container

    Freezer

        - Waffles (2 boxes)

        - Bread

        - Small peas

        - Ice cream (vanilla, rocky road)

    Kitchen

        - Popcorn

        - Mashed potatoes

        - Some Raman

        - Cereal (3 boxes of Cheerios)

        - Coffee (at least 2 bags - one ground, one with whole beans)

        - Crystal Light (3 partially empty small containers)

        - Jasmine rice

        - Condiments including lots of salt

        - Sugar, oil

        - Pretzel crisps

        - 4 bags of chips (salt & pepper, salt & vinegar, tortilla)

        - Tea (peach, black, Chai, green, earl Grey)

        - Some macaroni

        - Falafel mix

Water Level

    - Start: around 8 inches

    - Refilled to ~25 inches

    - Final level: 19 inches

Things To Buy

    - Soap for bathrooms (at least 2 bars needed; only 1 remaining)

    - Hand soap for kitchen sink (and bathrooms if desired)

    - Paper towels

    - Drinking water, of course

    - Paper plates (there is still a sizable stack in kitchen, but feel free to buy more since they save washing dishes somewhat).

    - Saran wrap

Other Notable Things

    - Fair amount of wasps on the observatory roof. Used traps to get some of the bastards.

    - Giant wildfire far west of MRO; cause huge blanket of smoke across the land. Thickest smoke did not reach MRO, luckily, so seeing wasn't as cruddy as could be.

    - Sometimes peeps in ATVs and the like would drive up to the MRO fence and stop and stare for a few minutes, then drive off. We didn't feed them, as Oliver advised,

and let them return to their natural habitat. Possible turf war

    - Flat tire right before we left for UW at the end of the trip. U-Car 891 does not actually have a lug wrench in the back, so possibly pick one up (and pay for on UCar card) or call up Rod (who's a total homie, but it takes an hour for him to drive there and an hour to drive back, so we shouldn't annoy him too much)