Subject: Echelle

From: Don York

Submitted: Wed, 23 Dec 1998 17:43:43 -0600 (CST)

Message number: 5 (previous: 4, next: 6 up: Index)

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

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