Disconnect or Down

Any word out there on the telescopes being disconnected or what the near-term future will be?

P4

Anyone know how long Prompt 4 will be offline? Or the status of P5 (most images are blurred)?

Thanks.

Weather at the PROMPT Telescopes

How does the scheduling algorithm decide whether or not to close the telescopes? I gather there must be only rudimentary ability to discriminate based on partial cloud cover or haze since there seem to be a lot of images exposed when conditions are cloudy. What are the long term plans? Is it possible to tie the PROMPT telescopes to whether or not some CTIO telescope is in use?

On a (maybe) related issue — have you thought about mounting some kind of inexpensive nightsky domecam that would show the sky, perhaps even placing an occasional image on the web? (or maybe even replace the PROMPTcam with a PROMPT nightskycam now that construction is done)? I've found that the cheap sky camera that we have at TCO is so good that I rely on it more than I rely on my own eyes to pick up incoming clouds (only cost a couple hundred $$). Hey I'd even chip in for one……

Question about Scheduling

Aaron, Dan, et al — thank you for the impressive software upgrade.  Huge help to an already-impressive system.  Two questions regarding the algorithm:

 1.  If a sequence of, say, 4 cycles of observations are scheduled and Skynet only finishes 3 of them on a single night (for whatever reason):  will Skynet return to complete the sequence on following nights?

 2.  How do successive cycles of observations within a single job deal with the airmass limit?  For example, if the first two blocks of observations are under the airmass limit but the third block of observations exceeds it what happens?  (Will it take only the first two?  Will it kill all 3? THrow up?  What?) 

Image Headers

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?

Prompt 2

Does anyone know if prompt2 will be back online tonight? Is there some good way to find out the plans for a situation like this (so I can know whether I should bother to submit jobs for it)? Perhaps some kind of regular posting that gives us the general outline of when a telescope will go down, or return?

Tracking problems

As you may have noticed, I submit rather long runs of time-series images on eclipsing binaries. I finally found time to reduce a several hour long run and found a huge amount of drift on PROMPT 4 — about 20 – 25% of the field! It is large both in dec and right ascension so there is obviously a large polar alignment error on this scope. I am lucky that my comparison stars stayed on the chip. Has anybody else found problems on other scopes? This would normally be of little concern to GRB event observers but is annoying for long runs on one object.

Telescope pointing

I’m wondering about the pointing accuracy of the telescopes. So far I’ve been working with Prompt4 and 2. Prompt4 points pretty accurately in most cases: the object can be off by 100-200 pixels, but usually it is near the image center. Prompt2 seems to point with a lower accuracy. Sometimes the object is near the edge, while in some cases I am not able to identify the area. It’d be helpful to analyse the situation taking into account pointing dependence on the hour angle, air mass, and object coordinates, but it is hard to do without the corresponding information in the image headers.

CTIO Weather Information ?

What is a good web site for CTIO weather information?

Trailed Images

What are the conditions underwhich images are trailed? I’ve mostly taken images with PROMPT 4 and most are trailed. I don’t seem to see a strong correlation (as I’d expect from telescope tracking error) with length of exposure, though I haven’t looked exhaustively at this (for example, 40 s, 60 s and 80 s exposures seem roughly trailed to the same extent).