SARA-RM Report Archive

Date	Name	Affiliation	Other Observers	Instrument	Hrs Observed	Hrs Lost	Reason	Observing Program
08/25/2021	Lisa Altinier	IAC	Roi Alonso	CCD	7	2	Equipment Failure	White Dwarf photometry. Tracking problems from the middle of the night.
08/25/2021	Alex McDaniel	Clemson University	Dieter Hartmann	Andor CCD	8	2.5	Equipment Failure	Blazar photo-z measurements. Technical issues: Had issues with tracking, and ultimately had to restart the software a few times to get things working. On one reset the node service wouldnt shutdown/startup properly but Paul and Brian helped resolve this. After that no other issues for the remainder of the night.
08/20/2021	Todd Vaccaro	Ball State University	None	Andor CCD	0	8	Other	Never opened due to dust. NOT weather page never fell below 30, but there were several domes open throughout the night including NOT. The site map never showed NOT had dust warning, only GTC showed it. The mirror cover was showing as open when I logged on and not knowing if there's an issue there I left as is. I only took bias frames.
08/18/2021	XIANMING HAN	Butler University	none	CCD	2	6	Other	1. Dust. 2. Telescope keeps loosing tracking. DEC was 46 degrees, air mass ~1.2 when this happenned.
08/17/2021	Ken Rumstay	VSU	None	CCD	0	9	Other	Too much dust in the air (24-38 micrograms per cubic meter) to open dome. Gave up an hour before sunrise.
08/15/2021	Javier Licandro	Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias	Hissa Medeiros	Andor camera (JKT)	3.5	4.5	Equipment Failure	We observed about 3.5 hours until the tracking start to fail. I did the full restart two times, but it is not fixed the problem.
08/14/2021	Lisa Altinier	IAC	Roi Alonso	CCD	3	5	Equipment Failure	WD photometry. After about 3h of observations, tracking started to fail, and became unbearable shortly after, lasting only a few minutes after RA/Dec resets, and same after full restarts.
08/14/2021	Martha Leake	Valdosta State University	none	Andor	4.5	4	Clouds	Asteroid photometry. Dust at 27-23 at start of night, stable most of evening; after I closed b/c of clouds, aerosols increased to 35 suddenly. Clouds interfered for at least half of my 4 hours. No tracking problems, but incomplete slew ("unable to complete slew...") message forced a full restart, and a re-setting my protocols. File space disappeared without warning, so all asteroid files and later darks were lost. Slewing was fine after restart.
08/12/2021	Ken Watanabe	FGCU	Nicolas RImbert	CCD	3	0.5	Equipment Failure	Blazars. Stopped tracking at the end.
08/11/2021	Todd Hillwig	Valparaiso University	None	Andor CCD	7	1	Equipment Failure	At the beginning of the night telescope tracked for about 30 minutes without issue on a target while using autofocus and waiting for twilight to end. Within 10 minutes of starting guiding, tracking turned off. After full restart didn't use guiding and tracking only turned off two more times (both very close to airmass 2 in the west, though).
08/10/2021	Ken Watanabe	FGCU	Nicolas Rimbert	CCD	6	1	Equipment Failure	BL Lac and other Blazars. Telescope stopped tracking.
08/09/2021	Michael Fauerbach	FGCU	NA	CCD	6	3	Equipment Failure	Asteroid photometry The first 3-4h were great, the telescope pointed and tracked fine, but then it stopped tracking. The usual reboot fixed that, but only for a short while.The period between the loss of tracking became shorter and shorter. After 5 reboots, it would not even track for a single exposure.