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

Important Status Update

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

P4

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

Thanks.

IMPORTANT DOWNTIME NOTICE!

The computer that runs all of the scheduling, data retrieval, and webserver functions will be down tomorrow (Friday 6/23/2006) morning starting around 9:00 AM (Eastern time).  They are doing work on the electrical systems in the room that it lives in so it needs to be shutdown while that is going on.  As such, it will be completely unavailable for scheduling or data retrieval during most of the day tomorrow.  

We hope that they will be able to complete the work tomorrow, but  that may not be the case.  We should be able to bring the system back up late in the afternoon/early evening tomorrow, but if they need to continue work, it will go down again Monday.

Sorry for the very short notice, but we were just informed of it ourselves.

–Aaron 

Exposure times and limiting airmass

I am wondering if it is possible to expand the exposure time range. I would really be interested in getting some brighter stars with exposure times as short as about 0.05 or 0.1 seconds. What is the shortest exposure time the cameras were tested with? A possibility to have a bit longer exposures, say, up to 100 or 120 seconds would also be appreciated.

Airmasses. Is it possible to lower the airmass limit? Say, to make it 1.2 or 1.3 so that the object could be observed at high elevations for sure. You could still avoid the closeness to the meridian limit.

Such small adjustments would help expanding our research program and making some observations more accurate.

PROMPT 1 back online

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.)

PROMPT Users

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Weds Night — Bad Images

Looks like some kind of serious problem tonight (Weds, March 1) — at least on PROMPT 4.  All the images from tonight that I’ve seen are badly out of focus, or something that looks like focus.