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Daily Reports

Observers on-site: Michael Mattern, Marie-Anne Carpine, Paul Law, Carsten Kramer and Stergios Amarantidis (AoD).

Operators: Gloria (day), Sergio (night).

All times are in Local Time.

Feb 18th, Tuesday

Maintenance: during maintenance CD fixed E1 (apparently the issue was found) and we conducted some tests with E0,1,2,3 (just tuning in some corresponding frequencies for each band).

15:00-22:00: Stergios: Basic training on NIKA2/EMIR observations. 15:00 LT: Wind gusts up to 20m/s thus we wait a couple of minutes for the weather to improve. At 16:21 LT we started with tuning with EMIR to project 143-24. Spindle errors and homology at scan 18, 19, 20, 21 (good start...). Manuel and Gloria think that this is caused as side effect after working on the emergency switch. Reset solves this problem. Trying with the 143-24 project. It doesn't work (either a focus observation). JT was contacted, the operator restarted odp but still plots are not created. The chopper was the culprit as it had been left in manual mode, we repeat a pointing test to see if we get the data and it works! Moving ahead with the observations.

Marie-Anne: Observing 143-24, mediocre conditions, we did calibrations on uranus, mars and 0458-020. We are observing NGC1977, map 4 vert. and then maps 1 to 4 horizontal. Spindle error but no scan lost (when changing project to test). Continuing with NGC1977 - project 143-24 (using the source 0430+052 for pointing; brightest source nearby) completing a forth repetition on the vertical maps. The weather though is quite unstable...

22:00-04:00: Carsten: Switching to 186-24. 1spindle error at the start. Weather instable, tau225 fluctuating around ~0.4 with clouds moving through. Pointing on 0851+202 showing quite some instabilities. Switching to test and trying Mars. Pointing stable on Mars and on 0851+202. Focus ok. 22h25: Start of wsw observation of J0956+3625, which still needs 3.5h. Scan 143 interrupted by spindle error at 23:34. One wind alarm during scan 145: 20m/s peak. Wind increasing with average values of ~10m/s. Scan 153, wind peaks at 20m/s, tracking errors reach 3". Pointed wobbler switched observations at elevations up to 84.0deg. Wind peaks reach 21m/s -- too high. Stop at 00:45. Start again at 1:15. 89deg elev is too high - cancelled. Pointing/Focus on Mars. Start at ~86deg elevation. Wind still high. 03:13 all loops on J0956+3625 completed. Next: J1147+3501.

Feb 19th, Wednesday

04:00-10:00: Michael:continue with 186-24 on source J1147+3501. Wind is still high but within the limits. Spindle error at 04:04. Wind is decreasing 04:45 and increasing again 05:05. Pointing on 0923+392 stable. tau225 still fluctuating around ~0.4. spindle error at 05:14. Stopping observations because of high wind at 05:52. tracking errors are still low however, 0.1% over 3". Restarting observations at 07:06 with project 133-24. tau225 stabilizing around ~0.4, some low clouds, wind below 15 m/s. Start with pointing/focus on K3-50A as no planet is available. The calibration scans can not be read in the 133-24 account, but work in poolw-24. continued with the calibration from the poolw-24. Afterwards no problems with the calibrations. But unstable pointing because of clouds. spindle error at 09:16. Again we don't see the plot as in the beginning of the project, but now FTS calibration also fails in pool. Continuum calibration works in pool. After the restart of odp the FTS onoff observations work with the project account poolw-24 but not with the project account 133-24. Restarting odp and doing some tests to see if the plots will appear. AS was contacted to check the issue. Apparently, the moment we change to the 133-24 account there are no mrtcal data. We found that the issue is only with the project 133-24, the other projects contain data...

10:00-16:00: Paul: Switch project from 133-24 (the odp is not working for this project) to 130-24 (09:17), and the odp of this project works. However, there is problem with the tuning.At 09:28, the cal problem is fixed, and now moving to pointing. However, as the cal did not appeared, and therefore another cal has been sent and in this case the calibration plot has appeared. At 09:35 another pointing has sent. The pointing at source 1923+210 was bad, but the observation was still carried out without pointing and focus to make sure FTS works for this project. At 09:47, the observing script for 130-24 works and now will return to perform pointing ( source NGC7027) 09:57 start focus on the source NGC7027 10:01, do another pointing with a nearby source (1923+210), the weather becoming to unstable with big clouds, but still okay for observation. At 11:19, the weather cont becoming more unstable, but the tau is fluctuating at 0.4. We cont observing with project 130-24. We are stopping observations at 11: because of the poor tau (R**2 ~0.25), despite the average tau is 0.16. The operator move the telescope to parking position in case of snow coming.

16:00-22:00: Marie-Anne: 17:25 the sky is clearing up so we will try to see if can get a stable calibration. 18:00 we cannot send the telescope on source. The computer, telescope group is trying still to fix the issue (21:59), all time of the shift has been lost.

22:00-04:00: Carsten: 22:00 Still not able to command the telescope from PaKo. Weather conditions improved, clear sky, tau<0.35. 02:00 tau stabilizes at around 0.4, but telescope is not yet working again. Giving up for tonight.

Feb 20th, Thursday

04:00-10:00: Michael:

10:00-16:00: Paul: 11:30 it moves again !! There had been a problem with the timing, which was off by one year since yesterday. ~13:00 LT starting with NIKA2 and training the new observers. DAQ gives 26/4/35 bad pixels for arrays 1/2/3, respectively. Trying some pointings/focus/calib_1scan while the sky weather worsens. After some tests (pointing, focus, calib_1scan, skydip) and training of the observers we will move to the project 128-24 considering that the stability is below p2p~2Jy/beam. We applied pointing at Neptune, and then a nearby source , which is faint, but we still able to apply a pointing, and start science observation for project 128-24 under the pool account. However note the thick cloud on the sky may affect the quality of the final product (tau ~0.3 but with large scatter). Cont with 128-24, but the data is bad and is rejected. Now no real science observation since 14:15 LT to test out some strange high flux toward the sub-scan of the science target but the pointing is fine. it is already reported in the TAPAS that these scans should be rejected. Also clouds are covering all over the site, and no further science observations.

16:00-22:00: Marie-Anne:

22:00-04:00: Carsten:

Feb 21st, Friday

04:00-10:00: Michael:

10:00-16:00: Paul:

16:00-22:00: Marie-Anne:

22:00-04:00: Carsten:

Feb 22nd, Saturday

04:00-10:00: Michael:

10:00-16:00: Paul:

16:00-22:00: Marie-Anne:

22:00-04:00: Carsten:

Feb 23rd, Sunday

04:00-10:00: Michael:

10:00-16:00: Paul:

16:00-22:00: Marie-Anne:

22:00-04:00: Carsten:

Feb 24th, Monday

04:00-10:00: Michael:

10:00-16:00: Paul:

16:00-22:00: Marie-Anne:

22:00-04:00: Carsten:

Feb 25th, Tuesday

03:30-10:30: Project 169-24 (EMIR; XPOL):