Contents
Daily Reports
October 30, (Tuesday)
Matthieu, Frédéric, Florian, Sean, Devika and Bilal are at the telescope.
Start of the pool... but it's snowing. We will wait until the weather clears up, which is expected around Thursday morning.
We are monitoring the KIDs behaviour in the dark for a while, waiting if there is any instabilities...
October 31, (Wednesday)
Same here, nothing could be done out of watching how stable the KIDs are when the window remain closed.
November 1, (Thursday)
We finally can observe with an incredible opacity of 0.150 and stable.
We had a few hiccups concerning the acquisition. The previous plan was to monitor any drift in calibration with the acquisition and see if it is correlated with anything tangible. But it turns out that last minute modification of the acquisition V2 rendered it useless, the pipeline being totally unable to process the raw data. Therefore, in a rush, with Juan online, we decided to switch immediately to v1. After a few adaptation, we could finally proceed with observation. NIKA2 IMBfits cannot be produced and therefore no monitoring with PIIC is possible this week. In these conditions it is impossible to have an estimate of the fluxes of the source we scan. This causes a problem for live follow-up of calibrators.
The following pattern is still used: we do science observation interrupted every two hours by scans on calibrators (MWC349, CRL2688 and NGC7027). During morning and afternoon, we followed the projects LP 192-16 and 050-18. The opacity remains under 0.3 but start to degrade after the sunset.
[Night shift : Frederic, Davika and Florian]
Opacity begins at 0.4 and keeps increasing during the night, unstable. We started the shift on 091-18. Around 21:45 UTC we began a set of calibration scans on Uranus : pointing, focus, and a beammap. We then produced 4 defocused beammaps for commissioning purposes, and repointed on Uranus. We checked our calibration using four secondary calibrators, and ran a skydip. We then went back to 091-18 for two hours with an opacity around .45, and follow with a new series of calibration scans, and tried to point on a source that unfortunately happened to be too faint to focus on. We then went back to 091-18. Around 04:30 UTC we had to retune the KIDS, and thus re-point the telescope.
November 3, (Saturday)
[Night shift : Florian and Frédéric]
03:23 am : the wind speed came back to normal. We have restarted the NIKA2 acquisition. Tuning is not perfect but we can't do better for now. We start with a pointing on a bright source.