Daily Reports
Contents
Jean-François Lestrade, Stavroula Katsiolis, Antonio Ferragamo, Angel Bongiovanni and Bilal Ladjelate arrive at the telescope for the 1st NIKA2 week of the winter semester.
Dec 10th, Tuesday
In good condition we start after the maintenance and system check with project 163-19, followed by project 143-19 after some calibration scans.
Dec 11th, Wednesday
00:00UT Jean-François and Antonio perform a pointing session, followed by the project 200-19
05:00UT Stavroula and Angel continue project 200-19 in mediocre conditions until the start of the 133-19 EMIR project at 9:30UT
17:00UT We get the telescope back, and the opacity drops to 0.1. We start with calibration.
21:00UT Jean-François and Antonio continue with the project 160-16, followed by 199-16, 126-19 and back to 199-16.
Dec 12th, Thursday
05:00UT Stavroula and Angel arrive for the morning shift and continue observations of 199-16, 200-19 and 163-19 under good weather conditions
10:00UT We leave the telescope to the EMIR project 133-19. 2mm of water vapor in the sky. (2mm pwv are you sure ? 2 mm pwv <=> tau225 = 0.1 !! which is a pretty good sky ! -SL-)
15:00UT We get the telescope back in mediocre conditions. While setting up, the wind rises and we have to stop observation because of rain.
Dec 13th, Friday
16:00UT After a long snow and windstorm, we can start the telescope again. We observe project 143-19 under mediocre conditions.
00:00UT The weather does not seem to improve. We will observe project 212-19 as its weather requirements are lower than the others.
Dec 14th, Saturday
05:00UT We observe project 200-19 under mediocre conditions. We leave the telescope for EMIR at 10AM.
16:00UT We get the telescope back to NIKA2 after a long afternoon of an EMIR project pointing a few degrees from the sun. The beam is heavily distorted. We will go away from the sun to let the antenna relax until we get good beam parameters for NIKA2.
Around 2-3AM, we start to have a weird slewing behavior of the antenna with frequent stops of the motor in azimuth. The telescope is stopped shortly after for precaution. Salvador's intervention in the morning get the telescope going fine again, for EMIR. We never got back the telescope after this. The wind rose too much and the antenna was stopped until Tuesday morning, where we were about to start again observation around 9AM, just to see the snow fall.