Daily Reports
Contents
Jan. 17th, Tuesday
Frederic, Sofia, Angelos, Jean join Angel and Stefano at the telescope.
16:00-21:00; Angel: no observations. Frozen rain and wind. Deicing working since yesterday night.
21:00-03:00; Stefano: wind and ice. The telescope is parked.
Jan. 18th, Wednesday
03:00-09:00; Angelos: no observations. Frozen rain went to snow before dawn; mild wind.
09:00-15:00, Sofia: no observations.
Let's take a little walk outside...
15:00-21:00 Frederic: no observations.
21:00-03:00 Stefano: Wind and snow. The telescope is completely frozen and parked. Few minutes after 2 a.m. local time, the taumeter drops suddenly to tau=0.1. We take a look outside. The sky is completely clear, the fog and clouds are no more there, the powder snow does not "pollute" the air anymore, the snowcats are working on the mountain, the stars shine, the thermometer marks -14 Celsius. Gloria increases the power of the de-icing. While we wait to have the 30m operational again, it will soon be time to chase the comet with binoculars and camera.
Jan. 19th, Thursday
03:00-09:00; Angelos: no observations. Clear sky, 100% visibility, no wind after dawn. Pedro and Salvador inspected the telescope and optimised the deicing subsystems by increasing power to some sectors of the backside. The Sun is our best ally right now.
09:00-15:00; Sofia: no observations
15:00-21:00; Frédéric: no observations.
21:00-03:00; Stefano: let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...
An old dream come true. We start a new tradition: Thursday midnight homemade pesto!!! Thank you to Angel for supporting the idea, to the 30m staff for finding the basil and to all those who stayed up late and joined 
Jan. 20th, Friday
03:00-09:00; Angelos: no observations. It keeps snowing.
09:00-15:00; Sofia: no observations. Sunny. Deicing in progress.
15:00-21:00; Frédéric: no observations. Deicing stopped at 19:05.
21:00-03:00; Stefano: [DAQ restarted at 19:45; bad KIDS: 50 (ar1), 7 (ar2), 69 (ar3)]; we start observing at 20:00 after 48 hours of de-icing. The telescope is miraculously on focus. Calib_scan on CRL618 (scan nr 5). First project 105-22, half repetition of B213-C6 (because then it's at too high elevation). Then I move to 126-22 but the scripts do not work. ~30 minutes lost trying to figure it out. The a set of calibration, including a beam map and a calib_1scan on Uranus (scans number 26 and 27). Then back on 105-22, that meanwhile has come down enough again and I perform 5 repetitions. The sky is then degrading and the shift ends.
Today's explorations:
Jan. 21st, Saturday
03:00-09:00; Angelos: Monitoring the stability of the opacity. It was varying significantly, with fluctuations of +/- 10 Jy/b (2 mm). We shifted to EMIR and tried to calibrate with the receiver but we encountered a small setback with the carousel/dichroics. Cold load in EMIR calibrations was not possible for EMIR. We switched back to NIKA2. DAQ started at 05:15; bad KIDS: 62 (ar1), 7 (ar2), 67 (ar3). Again, we tried to monitor the stability of the opacity, but the conditions remained unstable. The operator performed more tests in order to fix the issues with the EMIR calibrations. We keep filling time by monitoring the stability. Instabilities increased above 50Jy/b. Humidity reached 100%. Dense fog. We stopped the telescope at 07:00.
09:00-15:00; Sofia: Observations started at 11:00 because of bad opacity conditions. We started observing with EMIR on project 124-22, completing the first two sources scans with good pointing. At 12:00 we continued with the other two scans, but at 12:45 we had to stop because of the increase of the opacity (0.5 at 13:00). Resuming observations at 14:20, pointing is now good enough, so we complete project 124-22 by running the last two scans. Last scan launched at 14:50 (lasts 40 mins)
15:00-21:00; Frederic & Jean: The weather is getting bad. We canceled the last scan at 3:02pm. We resumed EMIR observations at 6:30pm. We observed project 125-22. We performed four scans (Tile 5, beta 5 to 8). We swicthed to NIKA2 at 8:00pm.
tau225=0.17 @ 17:30. tau is stable since 1.5h and prediction is good -- EMIR 109 GHz observations. Are there reasons not to switch to NIKA2 ? <CK>
Several episodes of dense fog and clouds completely embedding the telescope. Before switching to NIKA2, we waited for stabilization of the conditions, so to avoid having to wait with NIKA2 on the telescope inactive if such episodes occur again [since switching back and forth takes a significant amount of time]. <SB> tau225 indicated that clouds are only local and not thick at all. But probably the taumeter does its skydips at the sweet spot of the atmosphere. Good luck !
@20 Local time: switched back to NIKA2; DAQ restarted, bad KIDS: 46 (ar1), 7 (ar2), 63 (ar3). After the initial setup, we start observing 126-22. The new scripts work fine.
21:00-03:00; Stefano: I take over and observe one repetition of the scripts nr. 1, 2 of the project 126-22. Then 159-22, 8 repetitions on NGC1569. Beammap scan 20230121s139.
Jan. 22nd, Sunday
Jan. 23rd, Monday