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SV Notes for MJD 56237 (starting evening of November 5)

Observers

Observer 1 Observer 2 Run Manager SISPI Expert on Call Eyeball Squad
Soares Santos Depoy Soares Santos / Honscheid Honscheid Romer

DECam Configuration and Setup

SISPI Configuration File sv.ini
DECam constants DECAM:CURRENT
Proposal ID 2012B-0003
Image Processing (Calibration) NCSA
Image Processing (First Cut) NCSA

Almanac

Twilight ends 21:37, middle of night to hand over to community SV at 01:26 (but delayed if there is TCS/guider work)

Moonrise at 01:30 58% illuminated, 92 degrees away from our Mini-Survey field on Stripe 82. Dark for our full half-night!

Weather Conditions

Observing Plan and Goals for the Night

  1. Standard bias and dome flat sequence during afternoon
  2. Please try to get dome open for temperature equilibration at earliest appropriate time, be sure all cooling/ventilation systems are on.
Monitor Conditions:
  1. Check on DIMM status, running if at all possible.
  2. Make sure RASICAM is online if weather conditions permit.
  3. A few times per night ask the operator to contact the other telescopes on Tololo to get their seeing value. Record those in the eLog.

We expect time to be taken tonight to check the new pointing model - 1 evening hour, so handoff to community pushed back 1/2 hr?

Also will be guider work. May need data that cannot be incidentally obtained from normal SV program.

In the case that long exposures are behaving well >80% of the time:

  1. Photometric standards sequence as soon as dark enough (grizY in 3 fields at different airmasses, preferably one at X < 1.25, one at X = 1.25-1.65 and one at X > 1.65). Follow link for the suggested fields and scripts. Douglas suggests standards can begin 30 min before astronomical twilight.
  2. SN Templates if photometric and seeing <1.2". E1 is pretty well done so skip this and move on to other fields. In the deep fields, focus on g & r first to take advantage of dark night.
  3. If clear but seeing >1.2", take data for Seeing_Tests
  4. If thin clouds, any seeing, begin MiniSurvey
  5. Thicker clouds: DECal sweeps
  6. Photometric standards before handover time if photometric or thin clouds.
Should we still be unable to take longer exposures reliably:
  1. Photometric standards sequence as soon as dark enough (grizY in 3 fields at different airmasses, preferably one at X < 1.25, one at X = 1.25-1.65 and one at X > 1.65). Follow link for the suggested fields and scripts. Douglas suggests standards can begin 30 min before astronomical twilight.
  2. If seeing is <1.1" and reasonably stable, take series of Alignment_Observing in i band to check relative focus of science array and F/A chips, and to characterize PSF response to motion in all degrees of freedom on hexapod.
  3. In photometric conditions, take BD+17 sequence.
  4. With any additional photometric & good-seeing time, begin taking SN Templates in the shallow fields, but divide the exposure time into 60s increments, e.g. instead of 1x175s in g band, take 3x60s exposures.
  5. Photometric standards before handover time if photometric or thin clouds.

Notes from the 4PM Meeting and Additional Comments

Notes from Observers

Here is Night Summary

QR Reduced 216 of 324 exposures last night, most of them had short exposure times for TCS tests. Selected 10 CCDs of backplane 1 (this data can be used to confirm if the electronic noise isse has been fixed)



Notes on Analyses of Night's Data:

Sky conditions for the night from TASCA (time stamp in UT):
TASCA b-filter animated GIF for this night