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Daily Reports

Oct 7th, Monday

Bilal is at the telescope for preparatory operations.

• -- I have a bad feeling about this

Oct 8th, Tuesday

This is the start of the 1st NIKA2 pool of Summer 2019!

Jean-Baptiste, Jean-Paul, Marina, Samantha, and Stefano arrived at the telescope.

And what a start! The instrument is up and running, some problems remains to be identified. We can't start science observation yet because the opacity is above 0.6, but we still take this time to get NIKA2 in prime condition for the weeks to come. The opacity is going down (~0.5), so let's hope for the best tonight!

Night shift (Jean-Baptiste and Stefano + Bilal until ~23 UT)

The sky opacity is above 0.5. We perform some pointing and focus scans and one beam-map for learning standard operations. Then we wait for the sky to get better. Bilal is with us for a while (until ~23 UT). Following the AOD advice, we take some calibration scans after 23 UT, despite the sky opacity is still slightly out of the acceptable range.

A focus sequence taken across midnight UT is affected by the usual "midnight bug". Please check it out again.

At 2 a.m. UT we're still waiting for the opacity to get better, and it actually gets worse... for consolation the moon offers us a never-seen-before show, as she dives into the horizon.

Fotos of the day:

Oct 9th, Wednesday

While the opacity was too bad to observe with NIKA2, Dave continued investigating for the 10Hz spurious noise recently found in the cabin during the afternoon. Nothing was found, and as the evening arrived, we continued working with the instrument.

The opacity slowly drops to 0.5 when arrives the night.

Night shift (Jean-Baptiste and Stefano + Bilal until ~23:30 UT)

Calibrators and tests on extended sources in poor sky conditions (tau>0.5) until ... UT