Daily Reports
Because of COVID-19, only IRAM staff is allowed to observe on-site until new notice.
Contents
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.
Nov 25th, Thursday
Nov 26th, Friday
Nov 27th, Saturday
Nov 28th, Sunday
Nov 29th, Monday