Daily Reports
October 2, (Tuesday)
Andrew, Isabella, Jack, Laurent, Stefano, Matthieu and Bilal arrived at the telescope.
After a quick tutorial and a rough start, we manage to check pointing and focus on 2251+158. While it's bad, it's improving a lot with the night coming, and the weather is very promising.
We continue with a night of calibration measures, with beammaps on Uranus, Neptune, skydips and maps on the secondary calibrators, before we start with science projects.
[Andrew, Isabella and Jack took the shift Tuesday 10pm to Wednesday 6am.]
We started the shift with beam maps on Uranus and Neptune, followed by the @otf_loop_8_5 on each, before moving to NGC7027, CRL2688 and MWC349 for the otf loops.
After this, tau conditions appeared to be somewhat stable at tau~0.3, so we began science observations with the SZ LP 199-16, obtaining the 4 repetitions requested in the readme on PSZ2-G111.6. Up to this point, there had been some spikes in the tau, which was steadily trending upwards past 0.35. Next, after remaking the pointing and focus, we changed to project 094-18, and tried to make some maps of XLSSC102. The weather was becoming unstable, and trending about of 0.4, and we cancelled the observing script after 3/6 scans when it became clear that the conditions were no longer suitable for observing.
October 3, (Wednesday)
[Morning shift: Matthieu and Stefano]
The first hours were lost due to bad weather. Unstable and high tau (>0.5).
It became better after the sunset. When we restarted (10am local), we lost ~30min because the acquisiation software was down. Then, it was fixed by the AoD. Later, we managed to perform a focus and a skydip and started to observe the 083-18 program (PI:Oteo) until the end of the shift: J090910, J083932, J090613, J091454.
[Afternoon shift: Laurent and Bilal]
[Andrew, Isabella and Jack took the shift Wednesday 10pm to Thursday 6am.]
As the shift begins, the opacity is ~0.4, with a downward trend and appears to be becoming more stable. We begin with a skydip, followed by beammaps and @otf_loop_8_5 on Neptune, then Uranus. As with the previous night, this was followed by a pointing and OTF loop on each of NGC7027, CRL2688 and MWC349.
At midnight UTC (2am local) after pointing and focus on 2251+158, we begin the first science observations of the day for project 199-16 . Although we completed 4/4 repetitions requested last night, we go back for another 2 since tau was higher than requested yesterday. This time the conditions are very similar, with tau of ~0.35, but appears to be stable as we take the 2 repetitions on PSZ2-G111.6.
October 3, (Wednesday)
[Morning shift: Matthieu and Stefano]
We replace the nightshift team at 6am local. They were executing a deep integration on an the XLSSC102 SZ cluster from the 094-18 program. We completed the integration to reach the integration time requested by the PI. We then observed a source from the 083-18 program (PI:Oteo) program. Then, the weather got better (tau~0.3 and stable), so we shifted to the observation of 070-18 as asked by the AoD. We observed JINGLE10 (the other sources were still low). Then, there was the sunrise (~8h15 local). So, we started a series of pointing and focus. We lost time because the acquisition crashed at 8h30 local (similar to the previous day). The AoD restart it. We made pointing,focus, and skydip, and then we started to integrate ~45min on GOODS-N (192-16). We performed a new focus to check the stability and got a bad 2mm beam (~19 arcsec). We had difficulty to obtain a good focus and the KIDS needed to be retuned. Ultimately, we managed to get a good focus and started to observe some JINGLE objects of the 070-18 program, since the weather was still good (AoD told us to stop integrating on deep field): JINGLE186, JINGLE122.
[Afternoon shift: Laurent and Bilal] The opacity is terrible at the beginning of the shift. Let's hope for the best for when the sun sets!