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

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

Data from March 30/31

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 

PROMPT1 planned downtime

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 

FTP Site

Is the SKYNET ftp site up, and capable of providing data downloads?  Would someone post its address here?  Thanks.

P1 down, P3 up

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.

PROMPT Users

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