Re: Rochester Mark IV news

[Michael Koppelman <lolife@bitstream.net>]

So, is there a time in the future where we will have data for the same 
objects from the east coast, midwest and westcoast? That would truly be 
stupendous. I'm sure it's probably the plan, and I'm stating the obvious, 
but add Europe and Japan (just thinking northern hemisphere) and we could 
get continuous runs of objects. We can publish like a machine gun if we 
can get continuous runs of objects in two bands. If we got someone in 
Iceland, Hawaii and Russia, we'd be able to do things no one else has done.

Just day dreaming...
Michael Koppelman

On Saturday, August 3, 2002, at 12:42  PM, Stupendous Man wrote:

>
>   Last night, I ran the Rochester Mark IV for about three hours,
> following a field as it moved across the sky.  I acquired about
> 38 pairs of images, each 60 seconds long.  This is still the
> "commissioning" phase, but it's a good step forward.  I'm learning
> quite a lot.
>
>   Air flow: I noticed that images taken earlier this summer
> showed "measles", which I believe are caused by water condensing
> on the silicon.  It's a big problem during the hot, humid summer
> months, as Tom has noted.  Anyway, I wondered why the dry air
> system wasn't doing its job.  I took apart the pump and discovered
> that the two connections to the air tubing were _not_ "intake"
> and "output", but instead 2 separate outputs!  That is, the pump
> was pushing air into both ends of the loop which ran though the
> camera heads!  Yow.  No wonder the moisture wasn't getting sucked
> up by the dessicant: there must have been very little flow.
>
>   So, during the afternoon yesterday, I hacked up a method
> to send the air back into one of the two pump units, so that it does
> make a closed loop.  I don't think I sealed it very well, but
> at least the air should flow.  Last night, the images show a much
> more mild case of the measles than before.  Rah!  I am leaving
> the air pump on overnight and through the day today, and hope
> to remove all the moisture by tonight.
>
>   FITS header: As I try to reduce the data today, I have found
> four or five different errors in information written to the FITS
> header.  I need to fix the "tait" program so that it writes the
> data in a format that the pipeline can read.
>
>   Time: The clock on the computer controlling the telescope was fast
> by 19 minutes.  Oops.  Must fix that.
>
>   Pointing: I know the Dec of the camera home position, but not yet
> the relationship between degrees and steps of the Dec motor.  I know
> roughly the Hour Angle of the home position, but not yet the relationship
> between (time leaving the RA drive running at high speed) and motion
> in RA.  I need to write code which allows the user to point the
> telescope to a given (RA, Dec) position.
>
>   Control: The "taitcl" clien program does let me control the
> camera remotely.  Good.  However, as currently written, the client
> sends a command to the camera (good) and then immediately terminates,
> without waiting for a reply that the command has finished executing
> (bad).  As a result, I can't easily send a string of commands.
> Need to fix the interprocess communication so that one can opt
> to wait for one command to finish before sending another.
>
>   Despite the many errors and mishaps, it's exciting!
>
>                                                      Michael Richmond
>
>