FLWO Tillinghast 60-inch Telescope Log
2020a January-April

Tillinghast Telescope Log for the Month of January 2020

December 2019 JanuaryFebruary MarchApril May 2020 Schedule Schedules TDC
DateObserverInstObsLostWeatherInstTelObsComments
01/02/2020GEsquerdoTRES8.254.25004.250Mostly clear with elevated humidity and a few pesky fast moving cap-like clouds early but otherwise clear but with poor seeing early then soft after that
01/03/2020GEsquerdoTRES12.500000Clear all night with variable seeing, from very good to just below average. A very productive night!
01/04/2020GEsquerdoTRES12.500000Clear all night with mostly good seeing. The software fix for the dome issue seems to have helped. It still loses position after some time, and especially when pointing towards the north (same as before). I continued regular dome-homings throughout the
01/05/2020P BerlindTRES12.500000Clear, windy. God seeing 3/4 of night
01/06/2020P BerlindTRES12.500000Clear, seeing quite poor at start, very good most of night. Dome init, stow dome, then move dome to az 90, then stow dome, dome will have lost position. Saw 3rd batch of freshly launched Starlink satellites in morning sky, 5-degree long streak, 3-4 sate
01/07/2020GEsquerdo12.2512.2500000Clear all night with good seeing throughout. Productive night despite the bright moon
01/08/2020GEsquerdoTRES12.2500000Clear most of the night, only getting the very first of the approaching storm at the very end with some patchy and fast moving clouds. Seeing was poor all night, but managed to muck through. No new problems
01/09/2020GEsquerdo DYahalomiTRES012.2512.25000Clouds then fog with a couple batches of very light snow and snow-pellets. Never opened
01/10/2020DYahalomiTRES1300000cex
01/11/2020DYahalomiTRES12.50.500Overall another good night! Skies were clear throughout. Seeing improved throughout the night. Winds mostly from the NW and mostly stayed below 15mph. DEC motor wasn't responding when I first tried to run the telescope. Spoke with Damon and he recommended
01/12/2020DYahalomiTRES11.7511000redo
01/13/2020DYahalomiTRES10.522000A challenging (but still fun and interesting) night observing with soft seeing/clouds and avoiding the moon. Seeing very soft from open until around 9:30, then improved slightly. Patches of thin clouds started moving through the area around 12:30. Around
01/14/2020DYahalomi S HymanTRES012.512.5000Projector arm got stuck during tres.calib.short. . I ran a killcom and then redo and it fixed it. Very cloudy night. Power went out at 6:40pm. UPS lasted for about an hour or two and then everything shut off. The generator didn't kick in until around 12am. Around 12:30am with Emilio's help we got most of the computers and systems running again. The 60" is still not operational though. Cannot get the tdata folder to open correctly with the current date. When you ls in tdata in an xterm the folder appears to be empty. In iraf, when I enter "trsdate now", it returns errors stating that the "raw data directory tdata/tres/2020.0114 not found." Same thing when I try to cd into the directory in an xterm. Gider also not working -- it opens with a ./tresguide start command but in the xterm it prints "Initializing guider camera... server down: GUIDECAM" and in the Guidefui window a pop-up reads "detector server not connected". In the bench computer MyStep window there are a repeated string of READ wait! last out |Ffindhome| lastread |Initial|". Tried running a redo and this didn't fix it. In the tres.err window there are repeated prints of do_pulizzi waits on." We checked the box labeled Pulizzi above the bench computer. It is turned on, but there are several labels that have lights below them that are not on that maybe should be on. Didn't want to try pressing buttons without knowing what I was pressing. Luckily, it was very cloudy for the essentially the entire evening. So I am not sure how much observing that we missed. I went over some basic training with Sley (as much as I could do without observing...)
01/15/2020P BerlindTRES01212000Cloudy, some rain. Observed 2 bright stars, tracking and pointing were very good for those few minutes using follow target mode
01/16/2020P BerlindTRES666000Clear at midnight after big wet storm. Poor seeing to start, improved a little. Smooth sailing. Dome tracking good, did not need re-initialize. No software issues. Confirmed ADC is working properly. End of TRES run
01/17/2020S HymanFAST10.51.5010.50At start of night, had problem with running the FAST guider. The problem was resolved, but telescope still seems to track better without the guider turned on (with occasional corrections by hand paddle). Changed from 1200 grating to 300 grating around 21:
01/18/2020S HymanFAST11.50.5000.50Same issue as last night with telescope slewing at very beg=
01/19/2020S HymanFAST7.54.531.500Decent seeing at beginning and end of night, but clouds and poor seeing lasted for almost five hours in middle of the night. Red and blue standard star spectra still look off (as well as other spectra like symbiotic stars). Spent some time trying to figur
01/20/2020S HymanFAST01212000Cloudy for whole night and rainy at end of night. With Mike's help, we tried rotating the camera very slightly to see if that would fix the qfast spectrum issue. The clouds were thin enough at the beginning of the evening to take a quick spectrum of a bri
01/21/2020GEsquerdoTRES012.512.5000Thick fog and soaking wet humidity all night. Never opened
01/22/2021GEsquerdoTRES10.751.51.5000Clear to start but then something akin to a cap cloud formed over the mountain forcing me to sit idle for about 90 minutes until it broke. Mostly clear skies after that with fairly good but variable seeing. No problems for the first true night of the TR
01/23/2020GEsquerdoTRES12.2500000Clear throughout with good seeing almost the entire night. No problems
01/24/2020GEsquerdoTRES9.2533000Clouds early, breaking long enough to get roughly two hours of observations in before being paused again until just before midnight. Mostly clear to clear after that. OK to average seeing. No problems
01/25/2020P BerlindTRES844000Seeing
01/26/2020P BerlindTRES755000Clear, cloudy, fog, rain sprinkles, clear again. Obtained near-focus telescope image sequence
01/27/2020GEsquerdoTRES1200000Clear throughout with a gusty north wind most of the night. The seeing was soft, but not as bad as expected for the wind direction and speed. Productive night with no problems
01/28/2020GEsquerdoTRES1200000Clear all night. Seeing was fairly good early but degraded in the last third or so with a change in wind direction to the northwest off the summit and an increase in speed. No problems
01/29/2020GEsquerdoTRES1200000Few light and somewhat puffy clouds at sunset quickly gave way to clear skies for the entire night. Wind was from the north then northeast giving variable and generally soft seeing. A quite productive night. No problems
01/30/2020P BerlindTRES1111000Hello Sector 19. Clouds early, then clear. Seeing good at times, highly variable and quite poor much of night. Windy. Dome lost a few steps when struggling against the wind
01/31/2020P BerlindTRES1200000High wind, poor seeing for most of the night. Gider pc lost network needed reboot. Strong clean Li line in TESS target

Tillinghast Telescope Log for the Month of February 2020

December 2019 JanuaryFebruary MarchApril May 2020 Schedule Schedules TDC
DateObserverInstObsLostWeatherInstTelObsComments
02/01/2020GEsquerdoTRES1200000Clear most of the night with thin clouds arriving in the last few hours. Seeing was variable and soft early, improving towards the end
02/02/2020GEsquerdoTRES1020000Clear to start with reasonably good seeing despite the gusty winds. Seeing degraded in the the second half. Good progress was being made until I was shut down by clouds then high humidity in the last couple of hours. Accidentally slewed into the trip-w
02/03/2020GEsquerdoTRES01212000Clouds all night with elevated humidity at times. Never opened
02/04/2020P BerlindTRES11111000High wind pushing dome around, east wind seeing more than 4", closed
02/05/2020P BerlindTRES1200000Restarted galil to get RA drive working. Missed Betelgeuse last night got it tonight. Cold, windy, soft to poor seeing all night. 8 TESS targets
02/06/2020GEsquerdoTRES1111000High gusty wind at the start delayed my opening, but I was able to observe after an hour. Wind remained on the strong and gusty side most of the night, finally calming at the very end. Soft seeing throughout. No problems
02/07/2020GEsquerdoTRES1200000Clear all night with good seeing pretty much the entire time. Bright full moon put a bit of a crimp on the good conditions. Scope would not slew in RA to start the night. A TCSGalil restart and realtime system restart fixed that. Otherwise, no other p
02/08/2020GEsquerdoTRES11.750.250.25000Mostly clear but a small quick batch of cirrus part way through had me paused for a brief while. Some additional clouds late that I was able to work around and under. Seeing was on the softer side all night. No problems other than a very bright full mo
02/10/2020P BerlindTRES01212000winter storm, no observing
02/11/2020P BerlindTRES01212000 snow on ridge, including 2
02/12/2020GEsquerdoTRES10.511000Mostly clear to start but a batch of clouds came through early keeping me idle for about an hour until they passed. Remaining lingering clouds for a few hours after that, but they stayed far enough away that I was able to observe around them. Clear for
02/14/2020GEsquerdoTRES11.500000At the edge of a series of pineapple express-like clouds most of the nights, tiptoeing in at times with cirrus overhead. I was able to observe through and around this. Cleared at the very end. No problems
02/15/2020GEsquerdoTRES11.500000Clear most of the night with a stream of clouds remaining to the south of here until the last hour when a thin layer of cirrus came in until the end. Seeing was soft most of the night. No problems
02/16/2020M CalkinsTRES11.500000Cirrus at the end of the night, otherwise good seeing for most of the night... Telescope tracking and pointing is quite an improvement....!
02/17/2020M CalkinsTRES11.500000Observed all night in clear skies and good seeing. Hit one limit, really impressed with how easy and quickly it is to recover from a limit
02/18/2020M CalkinsTRES000000Engineering night spent with the WFS on the 60". Due to the focal point of the camera being different from the focal point of the WFS detector, taking data was at first problematic. However, once the proper focus was attained, several useful data images w
02/19/2020GEsquerdoTRES11.500000Clear all night with good seeing throughout. No problems
02/20/2020GEsquerdoTRES4.577000Clouds to start then breaking enough to get some observing in through light bands of clouds. Shut down for an hour around midnight then was able to re-open for another hour before getting shut down for good. Had two separate cases at the beginning and a
02/22/2020P BerlindTRES01111000Rain, thick fog
02/23/2020P BerlindTRES655000Fog clearing after 11pm, clear, seeing okay. Observed a few longer period TOIs. End of TRES run.
02/24/2020W BrownFAST10.50.50.5000stow tele
02/25/2020W BrownFAST4770000Started night in 30+ mph wind. Telescope had +-3 arcsec wind shake, fine for doing the bright symbiotic star program, but then seeing increased to 3-5 arcsec. I stopped observing when I couldn't acquire any targets, and then closed when wind regularly g
02/26/2020W BrownFAST10.75000.2500A good night of observing. The dome went to the wrong location at one point. I discovered that the switch that puts the dome in manual mode no longer exists; and the handle paddle in the chamber does NOT move the dome when I turn dome tracking off. I e
02/27/2020W BrownFAST1.59.59.250.2500hole,

Tillinghast Telescope Log for the Month of March 2020

December 2019 JanuaryFebruary MarchApril May 2020 Schedule Schedules TDC
DateObserverInstObsLostWeatherInstTelObsComments

Tillinghast Telescope Log for the Month of April 2020

December 2019 JanuaryFebruary MarchApril May 2020 Schedule Schedules TDC
DateObserverInstObsLostWeatherInstTelObsComments