PROMPT 5 Down

PROMPT 5 has gone down temporarily. The seal on the camera has finally failed (we knew it would eventually) and we had rather large amounts of ice forming. The camera has been sent back to Apogee for repair. P3’s camera recently arrived back from Apogee and is on its way to Chile now. The current plan is to put it onto P5 to bring it back into service.

Update on network issues

We have been experiencing some rather annoying network troubles over the past couple of months that were causing the PROMPT telescopes to lose their connection to Skynet.  While this was due in part to network issues between here and Chile, it was also due in large part to some less than optimal behavior in the underlying code.  Kevin has recently tracked this down, so we should now have a much more stable connection to the telescopes.  This means that more jobs should get done in a timely fashion and some parts of the Skynet website may be a bit snappier.

Current Status (Feb 2007)

Hello all and sorry for the lack of updates lately, but things have been very crazy.

We had a service trip to Chile in December that went very well in some ways, not so great in others.

The telescopes have all been recollimated and we are now seeing images with FWHM of around 1.5″ consistantly. In other good news we think we have a good handle on the moisture in the cameras problem. The bad news is that they all will need to go back to Apogee for repair, but this should fix the issue for good. As such, two cameras are actually on their way to Apogee right now to have this done.

P1 is still being used with the polarimeter, and as such is not available for scheduled jobs.

P2 is up and running, although it is currently using P4’s camera since P2’s actual camera is on its way to Apogee. It should be noted that P2 is not always under Terminator control, as there is a group doing manual exposures for a special project right now. It is up much of the time however, so feel free to schedule jobs on it.

P3 is down because it’s camera is with Apogee. We will let you know when it is back online.

P4 is down because its camera is on P2.

P5 is up and running. It is still having occasional problems with smearing and streaking, but they happen much less frequently now. If you have streaking or double stars a lot, please let us know. We are still trying to troubleshoot this issue. We have a very good PEC curve and the mount is well balanced. We are beginning to suspect the mount itself may have an issue, but we don’t know yet.

We expect to have some changes to the website that should make some things easier in the not too distant future, but we don’t know when exactly. Promptcam has been fixed, but it still shuts down occasionally. We also now have a Boltwood cloud sensor installed, but have not yet integrated it into our weather control.

–Aaron

Camera change on P3, Mount fix on P5

The camera on P3 is having shutter problems, so for the time being, we have moved the camera from P2 (which is awaiting a replacement computer) to the telescope P3.  The most important thing this means is that you should NOT USE old calibration images from P3 on new P3 data.

We think that the really bad mount issues on P5 are mostly resolved now.  PEC has been modeled and the correction implimented, and it seems pretty steady now.  Let us know if you see more double and smeared stars (it had a PEC drift of about 7 arcseconds over 2.5 minutes, so you will know the problem when you see it.)

We have been seeing some weird errors from the focusing system, so if you happen to get an image that is horribly out of focus, let us know.  This will help us track down when the problems are happening.

–Aaron

PROMPT 2 back online

We are happy to announce that PROMPT 2 is back up. The focus motor had to be removed while it was down, so it may not be perfectly collumnated and we are still making some adjustments to the focus. Let us know if you see any problems that we haven’t noticed yet.

–Aaron

Recent PROMPT 5 Issues

We recently noticed that PROMPT 5 is having a problem with its filter wheel. Until we get it all sorted out, please be very skeptical of what fitler is used on P5. Right now, we think that the wheel is stuck and is not changing filter properly, so the filter recorded in the header may be incorrect.

–Aaron

Telescope and software announcements

P3 and P5 have had their cameras return, so they are back online. We are finetuning some of the software, so they may not be perfect right away, but feel free to schedule jobs for them.

We have deployed new versions of the software that control the PROMPT scopes, so there might be a bug or two that pop up. Please report any oddities that you notice.

There was an update to the web interface as well. In addition to some small cosmetic changes, we now have an early version of scheduled observations. You can now specify a minimum start time for your observations (so tell it not to start until after 1:00 AM for instance) in addition to the solar angle and airmass constraints. You can also make the job periodically repeating (take these same 3 V band exposures every hour for a total of four sets, for instance.) You should be aware that due to the nature of que based scheduling, there is no guarantee that your observation will happen at exactly 1:00 AM or that it will repeat in exactly 1 hour (in the above examples) since there may be a higher priority job in your way. But this should provide you with greater flexibility for certain types of science.

–Aaron