Daily Reports

Because of COVID-19, only IRAM staff is allowed to observe on-site until new notice.

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Nov 2nd, Tuesday

21:00 - 03:00 Angel, Ioannis: After weekly maintenance, telescope was parked due to bad weather conditions. Very high tau and variations fog building up around the telescope.

Nov 3rd, Wednesday

03:00 - 09:00 Ioannis: The bad weather conditions continued throughout the night with fog, strong winds and icy rain (!). Operator turned on the deicing mechanism to make sure that we can get back to observing conditions faster as the weather improves. [Note that it will take several hours for the telescope to relax after switching off de-icing. (CK)] Conditions are expected to improve later in the morning..

Some snapshots from this morning:

09:00 - 15:00 Ioannis: Around 09:30 (UT) the weather conditions improved (tau ~0.26) and we started with the NIKA2 observations for the 2nd pool week. With the telescope at horizontal coordinates [140,40], the NIKA2 acquisition was initiated at the usual frequency (~24 Hz). The initial tuning of the resonances resulted in bad pixel numbers of 41/5/42 for Ar1/Ar2/Ar3, respectively. The noise traces were inspected and found to be very steep and dominated by the low frequencies, possibly due to the still unstable weather. No feature was found around 1 Hz, so there doesn't seem to be any issue with the PT. Then Mercury was used for initial pointing and focus. The baseline fluctuations were about 6-15 Jy/beam (rms) @ 2mm and about 30 Jy/beam (rms) @ 1mm. Beam size was 17.4" x 18.8" @ 2mm. With relatively stable baselines, a calib_1scan was performed on Mercury (scan 20211103s14) and a skydip (scan 20211103s11). Afterwards, start of observations for the DDT project E03-20. After pointing on 1226+023, we did 2 repetitions of the OTFmaps of the target source. Around 13:00 (UT) the weather conditions deteriorated, the beam broadened to about 19" @ 2mm and 13-14" @ 1mm and the baseline variations significantly increased (+/- 20 Jy/beam @ 2mm and +/- 40 Jy/beam at 1mm). Therefore, we continued with the time filler project 045-21 (during tau variations 0.3 - 0.5) until 14:30 (UT). At 13:55 (UT), "level 6: attente" was selected at the cryostat window, it was at "level 1: auto" until then.

15:00 - 21:00 Karine, Isabelle: Tau range is 0.2 - 0.3 at the beginning of the shift. After restarting the NIKA2 acquisition at ~48 Hz, observations for project 086-21 (ARSENAL) start. The noise trace behavior is generally similar as the previous shift and the number of bad pixels are 58/4/58 for Ar1/Ar2/Ar3, respectively.

The sky is finally getting clearer:

Nov 4th, Thursday

Nov 5th, Friday

Nov 6th, Saturday

Nov 7th, Sunday

Nov 8th, Monday

Nov 9th, Tuesday