Several team members have just gotten back from a maintainance trip to Chile, so there are some status changes.
The most important thing to note is that P3 has some pointing issues right now. The control software seems to have lost track of the t-point model, so any images taken in the past several days may have very bad pointing. We are working to correct the problem, so P4 may be offline for a night or two while we straighten it out. If you had a job observe on P4 recently, you may want to have a look and re-submit jobs that have unacceptable pointing. Sorry for this.
P4 currently has bad focus (happened about the same time as P3’s pointing issue) which is entirely due to human error. We are going to try and fix this tonight, so again, check recent jobs and re-submit anything that went horribly wrong. (I blame myself for this one, so feel free to curse my name if you lost anything critical.)
P5 is still encountering mount problems. Stars tend to drift a lot over long exposures. If you have short jobs on P5, they should look better than ever. If you have long jobs, they will still look terrible. We are aware of the problem and will correct it as soon as we can. (We may have to swap out P5’s mount, and if this is the case, it won’t happen until early December.) Again, we are very sorry for the inconvience.
P2 has had a critical computer failure, and is offline until we can get a replacement computer in place.
P1 now has a polarimeter installed, but we do not yet have control software in place for it to be controlled by Skynet. If you are interested in doing any polarimetry in the short term, let us know and we will see what we can work out. (No promises, but we will see what we can do.)
PROMPT is undergoing some growing pains right now, but if you can be patient a little while longer, we should have a better and more consistent operations in place soon. We have had several hardware problems simultaneously and several key members of the group have had other issues that needed their attention, but things should hopefully go more smoothly from here on out.
–Aaron
Aaron — Thank you for this update. It is a big help to those of us without day-to-day contact with you folks — we tend to just look at the images and despair, but have no idea of whether the problem is temporary, soon-to-be-fixed, or long-term. And none of us wants to be constantly writing in to say that “P3 has bad images”. Thanks.
Comment by horbrastar — November 6, 2006 @ 8:39 pm
Sure thing. We have had a lot of crazy stuff going on lately, but things are finally starting to calm down, so we can get things more stable.
I think that PROMPT is on the verge of greatness, we are just getting the last few details to click into place. Hopefully in a few months, we will look back on this time and laugh.
Comment by mrbook2 — November 6, 2006 @ 8:43 pm