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Daily Reports

Feb. 12th, (Tuesday)

Bilal, Alessia, Denis, Marco, Stefano, Nico arrived.

Alessia took the 1st shift from 4pm to midnight. Start of the observations just after the maintenance, everything went smoothly. At the beginning of the observations the FWHMs were a bit large and we decide to perform observations on primary and secondary calibrators for calibration purpose. We then followed GRB190114C (D02-18) for 2 hours. After the sunset the beams went back to nominal values and we started the observations of the LPSZ.

[Night Shift, Marco and Stefano]

The sunset today gave us good hope:

We take over at midnight sharp, during the 5th repetition of PSZ2G133 for program 199-16. We repeat it till the 9th repetition (included), taking care of performing the appropriate pointing and PSF checks.

After the usual skydip, pointing, focus, we move to program 192-16 and observe 5 repetitions of the COSMOS scan/cross-scan, with further pointing/PSF checks in between.

We then move further to 204-18. After re-focusing we perform 2 repetitions of NEP_L and one repetition on NEP5, with the usual pointing/PSF checks in between.

Unfortunately we lose 10 minutes at the beginning of 204-18 observations for technical reasons (see Tapas).

Tau(225) is stable at ~0.3 until 3 a.m., then spiky for roughly one hour, and finally stable again at ~0.25 later on.

Probably the creation of IMBFITS stopped on 20190213s5: at 5 a.m. UT, the PIIC monitor is inactive since 272 minutes. This scan was also refused by the IDL RTA and Nicolas reports that it is not properly written.

The new NK_RTA_2 script works very well.

Feb. 13th

[8am: Denis and Nico are taking their shift.]

- let the loop on NEP finish

- skydip

- MWC349, CRL2688, NGC7027

- Starting GASTON 8h30UT

- done with Gaston (11h30 UT). We wanted to go for a skydip, beammap and calibrators but the beams are 1mm are 14 arcsec, so we move to a time filler program that is ok with the 18 arcsec beam at 2mm : 176-18 / Ucam (DRser is now to low). We could complete this project this afternoon if everything goes fine. We'll keep monitoring the beam regularly.

- 14h UT: beams are too large, we switch to EMIR.

[Afternoon: Alessia shift.]

- After setting up observations for EMIR we have realized that there was a mistake with the visibility range, all the targets for both projects are visible only during the night. We have informed the EMIR pool manager WK and we came back to NIKA2 observations. Beams came back to normal so we finished the observations on the UCAM target for the project 176-18 and we have performed one scan of NGC7538_CS (159-18) before going to Uranus, check the focus and do a beammap [scan 20190213s181]. Observation on the project 123-18 and COSMOS for the 192-16 project (Deep field).

[Night Shift: Marco and Stefano]

The sunset today:

At midnight we start our shift at the telescope. Now we have the COSMOS in our hands; thanks Alessia for handing it over (“lascio il cosmo nelle vostre mani” cit.).

We complete the 4th repetition of the day, then pointing, focus, skydip, pointing and continue with 2 other repetitions of COSMOS (project 192-16).

We switch to project 199-16 and we perform 7 repetitions of source PSZ2G133. This completes the 16 total rep. requested.

Afterwards we perform 3 repetitions of NEP_L for 204-18, with the usual pointing/PSF checks. So far the total on this field is 5 rep.

Pointing and focus were very stable during the whole shift.

Tau was stable at ~0.15 the whole time, except few small spikes. Around 1 a.m. UT the tau fitting process stopped and we figured it out only after some time, sorry. The process was then restarted by Frederic, our operator.

The nk_rta_2 process today stopped few times.

Scans 20190214s4 and s45 seem to be bugged. The makeimbfits stopped and it was restarted following Albrecht’s instructions.

Feb. 14th

Morning shift: Denis and Nico.

We did a skydip and secondary calibrators before moving to project 111-18 on Saturn's satellites

[Afternoon: Alessia takes over.]

14h LT beams start to degrade and we switch to EMIR observations until 19h00. Second good beammap on Uranus scan # 20190214s214. Start of the project 159-18 but delayed because of a problem with VAC5. ~1h on 159-18 after rebooting VAC5, one scan with bloc manquant. Move to project 123-18 for ~1h before going to COSMOS.

[Night Shift: Marco and Stefano]

While waiting for our shift, here comes today's "Picture from Veleta", plus bonus: