Daily Reports
Contents
Nov 22nd, Tuesday
16:00-21:00; Angel: NIKA2 cryostat checked and DAQ activated for getting selected noise traces by DJ: ok. Rainy and foggy all the shift. System check devoted to the setup for VLBI dual-receiver test (Wednesday and Thursday, 12:30-16:30, LT). No observations. Wobbler system is apparently broken (MC, SS): under study.
21:00-03:00; Jean-François: opacity > 0.8 during the first half of the run, no observation. Then it "improved" down to 0.45 in tracking the Bilal tau predictions that were promising. So we decided to have a go with nika2. [DAQ restarted at ~01:20 LT; Bad KIDs: 68, 4, 104]. However, after pointing and focus on Uranus, the opacity abruptly increased to higher than 1 till the end of the shift.
Nov 23rd, Wednesday
03:00-09:00; Longji: High opacity and fog during the first half of the shift. Opacity dropped to 0.5 and it was reasonably stable at ~07h (LT). DAQ restarted; bad KIDs: 65, 8, 90. Pointing/focus on 1226+023. El. motors current alarm was triggered several times because of the wind. Resuming at 08:45. Mean tau_225 about 0.45. Bilal takes over.
09:00-14:00; Bilal: Starting with mediocre weather (tau~0.5) and timeline variations above 50Jy! I've been looping around pointings and focus because of very poor weather, deep within clouds. At the end of the shift, moving on to calibrators to get some values. Instability going from 50Jy to 200Jy, easing down to 10Jy at the end of the shift.
15:00-21:00; Angel: tau_225 < 0.3 over the shift. The atmosphere was quite unstable till ~15:30 (p2p variations oscillated between +/-5 and 20 Jy/beam at 2 mm; slightly enhanced beam: e.g. FHWM 18.6 x 19.5 sq.-arcsec). After some stabilization, we got a calib_1scan on NGC7027 and CRL2688 (scans 202211s127 and s129), and a skydip (s132). Switching to project 160-16 (IMEGIN). We stopped for over 20 min at 16:50 (LT) for checking the Wobbler system (SS). We took advantage of that test for retuning (DAQ restarted; bad KIDs: 52, 7, 73) under more stable conditions and refocusing. At last, we observed NGC7331 for ~1.5 h, distributed in 9.5 reps., until the target reached high elevations. Then, we moved to NGC337 (IMEGIN) and observed this galaxy for 1.2 h (16 reps.). At 20:40 we pointed to Neptune (under nikas-22) and launched a calib_1scan (s180).
21:00-03:00; Aurore: Calibrations (beammap [20221124s101], calib_1scan and skydip) were performed on Uranus at the beginning of the shift. Then I switched to GASTON for 2 scans, however even though the atmosphere was stable at the beginning, it deteriorated during the scans, so that we will probably have to throw them away. After the stability improved, I relaunched another scan but the atmosphere deteriorated again. I redid a calibration round (calib_1scan and skydip) on Uranus after that, since the sources of GASTON and 008-16 were too high and none of the sources of 089-22 were up. Unfortunately I missed the calibrations on CRL618, as it was also too high. Towards the end of the shift I tried to go to the one source of 089-22 that was up, hoping that by the time the telescope reached the source, the stability would have improved, but in fact it was worse. Together with the telescope being stuck in elevation about 4-5 times, it was quite a frustrating night, despite a reasonable opacity (around 0.3 most of the time, but with frequent spikes at ~ 0.4-0.5).
Nov 24th, Thursday
03:00-09:00; Longji:
[retuning at 07:30; bad KIDs: 46, 6, 65]
09:00-12:30; Bilal: [Bad KIDs: 47, 6, 66] Starting where Longji left, with observations of COSMOS in good weather conditions. tau_225~0.25 and timeline variations around 2-3Jy. Four stuck scan cancelled (20221124s65, 66, 67 and 68). I will continue with LPSZ observations (PSZ2G086.9) for two repetitions. After a reasonable pointing and focus session, we move to IMEGIN, to observe NGC4254 for 3 repetitions, sharing the good weather with everyone.
12:30- ; Pablo:
Nov 25th, Friday
Nov 26th, Saturday
Nov 27th, Sunday
Nov 28th, Monday