DailyReportsNika2Run2

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November 2015, 27 (Friday)

• The weather was not great about 0.3 to 0.4 opacity for most of the observation time. We had a bit of wind but could keep observing
• The instruments behave quite well. We just only had a crash of the acquisition software:
  • request status packet timeout error at .... Qt has caught an exception
• We notice an extra line in the TOI power spectrum at low frequency (see figure). This coincide with the switch on of the EMIR - we are not sure the two events are really related. Need to investigate further

• We concentrated on beammaps, skydips and reltively faint sources (CXTau, FTTau, DRTau,APM08279)

• We have also tested the capabilities of observing large regions on the sky. We did large 20'x20'OTF maps of NGC1068 and 15'x15' of DeepField1

• We have investigated the differences of beams for pixels in the center and in the external area of the matrix, for both pointing and focus scans:

• We have worked on the reduction of geometries and we have found various issues (see figure below):

  • --> The new procedure which give us the geometry from a set of beam map scans (make_geometry.pro) now make a first kid selection before the actual kid_selection program (widget with the different map per KID to select). This first kid selection allow one to get a first geometry without spending a lot of time clicking on the small maps when running the kid_selection program. However, it seems there are some yet unidentified bugs in the program which does this first selection. As you can see on the top-left figure showing a subset of Uranus maps before starting the KID selection, a lot of good KID have been wrongly discarded.

    --> We therefore need to reset all the selection to start over from scratch. As you can see on the top-center figure the reset_all button does not work properly and the COMB KIDs (kidpar.type = 3) are not recovered. We therefore need to use the recently added Recover button to get back all the KIDs of the considered subsample.

    --> After having recovered the good KIDs which had been discarded and having discarded the KIDs we do not want to use, we end up with the top-right figure. As you can see, the number of KIDs we want to consider is significantly higher than the one we get if we do not use the kid_selection program.

November 2015, 26 (Thursday)

• The weather was not great at the begining of the night tau=0.4 but improved later on reaching about tau=0.2. The wind was pretty strong and we had a largely fluctuating atmosphere.
• We did some testing work on ncs to understand the problem we had yesterday when the telescope could not track some sources when using focusliss. After some scans it seemed clear that the problem is that there was not track in between two focusliss in two different sources. The recommendation is to do a track when we switch sources - this is what we normally so it should not bea problem. [Comment by CK (27-Nov): It is good that you have a work-around. However, the problem should not happen and indicates that the rather new focusliss scans are not fully debugged. Walter is currently investigating this problem and may come back with improved software soon.]
• We did beammaps on Uranus and skydips in order to ensure redundancy - need to work on the data now
• We did observations on relatively faint sources to extrack rms noise - need to finalize the work on calibration to make this possible

• Telescope starts oscillating wildly in Azimuth for few of the focusliss scans, as reported by operators. See the dedicated wiki. Gabriel is investigating in detail. Hans suggests to change testwise observing parameters. Operators have received instructions. (CK, 27-Nov)

Beam shapes of the arrays 1 & 3 (the soft. to read the NIKA raw did not distinguish btw. the ar1 & 3; this has to be fixed by the NIKA team). Maps 20151126s112-114 are drawn in red, green and blue. The edge pixels show clearly elongated beams. This needs a deeper analysis, i.e. further data. (RZ, Nov 27)

November 2015, 25 (Wednesday)

• Good weather (opacity of ~0.1) but still a lot of wind --> No observations

• We reduced beam maps and updated geometries (skydip coefficients and kid selection)
• We made an analysis on the Uranus beammap (20151124s171) to characterize the beam.

  • --> total beam profile and primary beam gaussian fit.

    --> integrated total beam and primary beam to compute the secondary beam fraction.

Unfortunately this map was made quite out of focus in y,z, i.e. the derived numbers are representative only for out of focus data (RZ, Nov 26)

November 2015, 24 (Tuesday)

• NIKA2 is cold again. Arrival at the telescope of AB, JMP, BC, FR.
• Installation of the new AMC card. New settings from Olivier to allow booting of 8 cards on CRATE 3, afterall we dichted one card because of sync problems
• Some trouble to find the first resonances, but wizard Alain came and saved the day
• Some nice skydips tau~0.3, but nice fit
• First geometry on the sky, without a proper refkid at 1mm we can not use the cross for pointing and focus, so back to lissajous
• First focus on 3C84, followed by geometry
• Quick picture on the geometry: