Last night we had periodic clouds, but the humidity did not get high enough to trigger the domes. As such, be sure to look carefully at your data from the night of March 30/31. You may need to re-submit jobs if your observations were clouded out.
–Aaron
We will be taking PROMPT1 offline for one night sometime in the next few days. Because P1 only has an I band filter, this shouldn't cause too many problems as P4 also has an I band filter. We are taking it offline to have a look at, and update, the T-point model. We will use these results to decide how to handle updates to the other scopes.
If you need P1 for a specific need in the next few days, please let us know and we will try to minimize the inconvience to all parties.
–Aaron
I don't imagine any of the Prompt programmers are (exactly) looking for things to do, but here is one item for the list that you might want to think about. Someday. It would be nice to be able to queue up an object for 2 or 3 separate images at different times on a given night, or be able to take images on successive nights but not separated by, always, the same time interval (which leads to aliasing in the kind of work that I am doing, and possibly Dan Caton). I do that scheduling now in a crude way by submitting jobs with different airmass limits, and that sorta works. But the minimum airmass of 1.5 is significantly too large. Even if it were 1.25 or 1.3 it would help me enormously as I might be able to tweak the system to give me exposures within an hour or so of the meridian — though I'm not sure I understand how the existing algorithm schedules. I'm also wondering if the 80 second maximum exposure might be raised sometime — especially since it seems to me that tracking on P4 is better these days.
Is the SKYNET ftp site up, and capable of providing data downloads? Would someone post its address here? Thanks.
We are going to be moving the camera from P1 onto P3 soon (hopefully later today.) This will give us access to a larger, more useful filter set while we wait for P3’s actual camera to get back to Chile. You may want to hold off on scheduling any jobs on P3 until after we get a chance to do some tests on it tonight. Some of the behind the scenes computer hardware isn’t quite the same as on the other scopes, so P3 might not behave right away. I will put a status update in a comment on this message when we are satisfied with P3.
UPDATE: Well, it was a nice idea while it lasted. The adaptor plate that connects the camera to the filter wheel is with P3’s camera, so we can’t just move P1’s camera there. We will bring P1 back up until we get this all sorted out.
DSS image is great, SIMBAD lookup also…..but none of my downloads work today (not header nor jpeg nor fits) for any image I’ve taken. Skynet generates a blank white screen when asking for a download.
Is the PROMPT/Skynet website having problems this morning (Friday)? We’re having difficulty reaching the site…….
The same problem (here) seemed to reassert itself on March 11/12 with all of my images, though everything seemed to function fine for me on March 10/11. I’m using P4. An example would be obs 1281 on Mar 11/12 — the image is some field I don’t recognize. On March 10/11 the same object (obs 1253) lists the same RA and DEC in the image header but this time the object I wanted is present in the field. Same for other pairs of images from these two nights (i.e. 1253 is fine on Mar 10/11, but points to some other field for obs 1279 on Mar 11/12).
PROMPT 1 has been brought back online after some repairs were made to its dome. It has only one filter but if you have any I band jobs, please feel free to use it. We had a small pointing problem just before it was taken offline to work on the dome, but we think that is cleared up. (Please let us know if it reports the correct coordinates in the header but images the wrong field. It pointed quite well last night, but we only had a few jobs in one part of the sky.)
None of my images last night (March 7/8) contained the specified fields (at least on P4). Do the FITS headers properly list the telescope position? Any idea what the cause was and whether it will be with us for a time?
