Chris Mallouris, Connie Rockosi, Shu-i Wang and the APO staff used the echelle for the night of Dec. 14, 1998. Spectra were taken of various types of stars, as faint as 8.5 magnitude. The weather was very bad as far as cloud cover goes and the pointing to the new focus (Nasmyth 1) was such that we pointed the old fashioned way, by hand. Under these conditions, we could not measure efficiency of guider or spectrograph. The cloud monitor was not available to give even a rough correction for clouds. Mechanically, all went well, as it did with software. The few bugs were immediately understood by Craig Loomis, who was on guard all night, and fixed. The spectra were put through IRAF on the spot, so there are not first order problems involving use of canned software with our particular format. The guider (a slit viewing camera at this point) and the associated software worked fine, as did the "nudger" in Remark for keeping the object on the slit. Cal lamps and flat fields also worked fine. (We operated the flip mirror that switches between slit viewing and lamp viewing by hand because of a mechanical issue, since fixed.) We did some stability checks involving only pointing at one target and doing a full set of calibrations, which went well. Next steps involve fully reducing the spectra recorded and carrying out the full commissioning plan that Doug Duncan and I put together. The latter will occur through January and February. The nights scheduled (EN02) are full nights, so the lack of an automatically rotating tertiary will not pose issues, though we hope to be able to commission with this last piece in the near future. As we learn more specifics, Doug and I will post them here. DON APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 5 in the apo35-echelle archive. You can find APO the archive on http://www.astro.princeton.edu/APO/apo35-echelle/INDEX.html APO To join/leave the list, send mail to apo35-request@astro.princeton.edu APO To post a message, mail it to apo35-echelle@astro.princeton.edu APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO