Daily Reports

Because of COVID-19, only IRAM staff is allowed to observe on-site until new notice.

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Nov 23rd, Tuesday

We successfully arrived at the telescope with the first winter transport of the season.

Afternoon shift (16:00-21:00; Ioannis + Stefano): we try to focus but the sky is highly variable. We give up and stop when the peak-to-peak variations in the timeline of pointings reach 400 Jy/beam (four hundred). We're now immersed in the clouds. Temperature -9 Celsius; humidity 100%, wind ~10 m/s.

Today's journey to the stars:

First half of the night shift (21:00-03:00; Stefano and Juan): fog, snow and wind. The telescope is parked. The de-icing is on. At roughly midnight (CET) the wind calms down and it is not snowing anymore. It seems that the fog might also disappear soon. At 00:22 CET the sky is clear and the telescope moves out of the parking position. We now need to wait a bit until the primary surface relaxes after the de-icing. Frederic goes up on the platform to remove some snow and ice from the subreflector. After the usual pointing/focus, we switch to 010-21 and we observe 3 repetitions of NGC1333-C2, thus reaching a total of 17 repetitions and 5h40m in total on this source (total time requested 7h per target). Tau(225)~0.20-0.30. Calib_1scan on Uranus (20211124s21)

Nov 24th, Wednesday

03:00 - 09:00, Longji: The shift started with the observation on 010-21. After 1-hour observations, a new focus and a skydip (20211124s40), I switched to N2CLS(192-16) with tau~0.27. The weather degraded quickly in less than 1 hour and I stopped the observation. I switched to 045-21 from 6:30am CET. A new focus was made at the end of the shift but we have elliptical beam at 1mm even at the best focus returned.

09:00 - 15:00, Ioannis & Carsten: tau~0.37, +/-5Jy: 2 scans on NGC3938 (IMEGIN), Switching to 086-21 (ARSENAL, 1xrepetition). Entering into clouds and becoming much more instable. Switched to EMIR backup 015-21. Mars peak temperature varies by >50%. Stop.

15:00 - 21:00, Andrew (remote): The telescope has remained in fog throughout this shift. I didn't enter a single command into Pako. Better luck to the next shifts... :*-(

21:00 - 03:00, Stefano & Laurence: Bad weather and telescope parked throughout the shift.

All we could observe today...

Nov 25th, Thursday

03:00 - 09:00, Alex waking up, bad weather telescope in park in the fog, waiting for clear skies. 07:20, Sky is clearing up, no instruction on what to observe (wrong email address) so doing a focus on 1226+023 to proceed on 192-6... tau at 0.17. Took some time to get a proper focus (mostly in my brain)

09:00 - 15:00, Carsten & Ioannis. tau~0.25-0.3 stable. Clear sky, some highy ice clouds. Doing 084-21. Source at ~30deg from the sun. +-5Jy at 2mm. calib_1scan #75 on Mars. Skydip #76. Continuing on 084-21 until thick clouds rise leading to +-20Jy and more of instability. Stopped.

15:00 - 21:00, Andrew (remote). After 90 mins, the fog cleared and turned into some excellent conditions. Two full sweeps of the GASTON GP field with tau ~0.15 before it got too low - the GP field is almost complete now (~1 hour remaining or so). Skydip [20211125s129], and calib_1scan [20211125s138] on Uranus before moving to 007-21. The weather deteriorated rapidly during the second repeat on 4149, which is likely to have some junk data as a result.

Our favorite telescope observing mapping the Galactic plane for GASTON...
(Download and watch it bigger on your laptop)

21:00-03:00 Stefano + Juan + Philippe + Michael + Quang. The telescope is stopped. Around 23 UT Stefano suggests all others to go to bed and have some good rest. The sky is highly variable. We have also some consistent snow fall. At ~1 a.m. UT, it does not snow anymore and the de-icing is then switched off. Tau is still quite unstable and there's still cloud coverage. Let's see how it develops in the next hour or so... More snow!

Nov 26th, Friday

03:00 - 09:00 Guilaine: Start at around 4h15. Pointing/Focus. KIDs tuning not good. Atmosphere very unstable. Keep on trying. Around 05h20 real improvement. Tau around 0.3 but not very stable. Good focus. Do one repeat on A1413 (086-21, switching to 48Hz). 6h25: tau improved much faster than predictions, go to N2CLS (cosmos field, 2x(2x27) min) [acquisition back to 24 Hz]. Focus at 7h30 and 8h40. Last pointing at 8:40. Launch one more repeat on N2CLS (tau = 0.11, wow!).

09:00 - 15:00 Ioannis: After pointing and focus on 1253-055, 2 repetitions for project 084-21. Then pointing and focus on Mars, as well as a calib_1scan [20211126s94] and a skydip [20211126s95]. Afterwards, two more repetitions for 084-21 and the project is completed. Very good weather throughout the shift with tau ~ 0.15.

15:00 - 21:00. Pointing and focus on 1741-038, 1mm beams are slightly elliptical. With an excellent tau of ~0.15, I completed the GASTON Galactic Plane survey field after just over 4 years since the first scans (nice!). Three repetitions on B335 for project 035-21 with tau increasing to ~0.25 for the last scans. After a skydip (20211126s156) and calib_1scan on NGC7027 (20211126s157), I moved on to 007-21 and 4149.

21:00 - 03:00. Laurence, Emmanuel & Stefano. The sky keeps good/decent. We observe one repetition on Cluster PSZ1G080 (199-16), then calibration scans on Uranus (calib_1scan is 20211126s193; beammap is s195); then we switch to 007-21 and observe sources 4149 (1 repetition before it gets too high in Elevation) and source 1390 (6 repetitions - only one repetition left for this source!).

Today's sunset

Nov 27th, Saturday

Nov 28th, Sunday

Nov 29th, Monday

Nov 30th, Tuesday