Night 1: 2002-Jun-04 (UT)
Personnel
- Summit: A. Conrad, D. Cowley, S. Faber, A. Phillips,
G. Saurage, G. Tolleth, V. Wallace, G. Wirth
- Waimea: E. Chock, D. Clarke, A. Conrad,
M. Davis, D. Finkbeiner, S. Kwok, B. Schaefer
- Santa Cruz: W. Deich, R. Kibrick, R. Schiavon
Accomplishments
The first commissioning night for DEIMOS was a smashing
success! We completed all the tasks we had planned to do
tonight, plus others scheduled for later in the run. A
summary of the accomplishments:
- Acquired first star on guider very close to the
predicted location.
- Ran AUTOFOC and improved the image quality.
- Verified that we had properly deduced the flip and
orientation of the guider and detector as projected onto
the sky.
- Took data to calibrate the guider pixel scale.
- Calibrated the rotator zero point (made adjustment of
0.355° and achieved accuracy of 0.01°)
- Calibrated the REF pointing origin at the center of the
guider.
- Calibrated SLIT, DEIMOS, and IMAGE pointing origins.
- Observed standard star fields and deduced preliminary
efficiency data.
- Observed astrometric fields for use in determining
plate scales and distortions.
- Successfully completed slitmask alignment on a mask of
star boxes and determined that the predicted plate scale
is off by about 1%.
- Acquired "pretty pictures" of several targets of
interest.
- Acquired PMFM images to be used for calibrating Mira
for tomorrow night.
- Characterized vignetting in the guider and science
detector.
- Troubleshot problems involving rotator communication
and ability to move REF onto the pickoff mirror (setting
DREF).
Outstanding Problems
- A significant amount of fixed pattern noise plagues the
guider images.
- Proper calibration of DREF.
Night 2: 2002-Jun-05 (UT)
Personnel
- Summit: S. Faber, A. Phillips,
G. Saurage, V. Wallace, G. Wirth
- Waimea: E.. Chock, D. Clarke,
M. Davis, D. Finkbeiner, S. Kwok
- Santa Cruz: R. Kibrick, R. Schiavon
Accomplishments
We had a second consecutive smooth night on DEIMOS with great
weather, more engineering and even a taste of some science.
- Successfully aligned two slitmasks.
- Acquired several hours of deep exposures on two slitmasks.
- Observed standard stars.
- Took pretty pictures of a beautiful edge-on spiral galaxy.
- Ran Mira (telescope focus) successfully.
- Took data to calibrate the linearity and repeatability of
the DEIMOS rotator.
- Determined the DEIMOS rotator limits of rotation in the
clockwise and anticlockwise directions.
- Attempted unsuccessfully to define REF at the pickoff
mirror center.
Outstanding Problems
- Fixed pattern noise in guider images.
- Proper calibration of DREF.
Night 3: 2002-Jun-06 (UT)
Personnel
- Summit: S. Faber, A. Phillips,
G. Saurage, V. Wallace, G. Wirth
- Waimea: D. Clarke,
M. Davis, D. Finkbeiner, S. Kwok
- Santa Cruz: R. Kibrick
Accomplishments
Our third night was productive but not perfect. We were lucky
to be on sky at all following a major failure of the rotation
drive gear box in the afternoon; disaster was averted only
because the instrument team had had the foresight to assemble a
complete spare of the suspect part. This potentially
disastrous failure was fixed within a few hours and we were
back in business well before going on sky.
During the night, the instrument experienced intermittent
problems reading out the CCD mosaic; the images were
sometimes corrupted by missing data. Analysis is in
progress.
Key accomplishments:
- Successfully aligned two slitmasks.
- Obtained nice set of guider twilight flats.
- Obtained nice set of imaging flats.
- Saved guidebox images for analysis.
- Measured the focus offset between the guider pickoff
mirror and the slitmask surface (negligible).
- Saved guider frames at various secondary focus settings
to compare with autofoc solution.
- Acquired deep exposures on one slitmask. Integrations
on a second were lost due to an ACS failure.
- Ran Mira (telescope focus) successfully and verified that
piston, tilt, and stack errors were reduced.
- Attempted unsuccessfully (again) to define REF at the pickoff
mirror center.
Outstanding Problems
- Fixed pattern noise in guider images.
- Proper calibration of DREF.
- CCD readout anomalies.