### OBSDATE ### 20121024 ### LOGDATE ### 121024 ### OBSERVERS ### BAW ### WEATHER ### Clear and dry ### LOCATION ### Home ### PROGRAM ### K giants - a bit of fun ### SIDEROSTATS ### n3 s2 ### TARGETS ### nu Oct (HR 8254) plus calibrators: alf Pav, bet Pav, gam Pav, bet Oct. ### QUALITY ### Very good (several calibrated points) ### PROBLEMS ### I started by attempting to auto-collimate S4. South worked fine, but I couldn't find the laser on the north periscope in the limited amount of time that I spent. One factor was that the azimuth apparently lost (gained?) 2 degrees slewing from south to north. The south autocol position is repeatable, so the siderostat might be useful in the south if you make sure to re-index if you slew very far. I also tried to find the laser with N1 (as I need N1 working for the M-Giants). I was unsuccessful in either the north or the south. I suspect this is mostly due to the indexing problem that I reported last night. Interestingly, I was able to index properly after observing, so I may try again, tomorrow or Friday. When we had this problem before, I decided it might be somewhat temperature dependent (search the trip reports), and this seems to support that. I went to my "back-up" project of K-giants that I had told Rob Wittenmeyer that I would try to get diameters for. The star was acquired easily, but I was unable to find fringes. I then went to Alf Pav in order to have a nice bright star on which to search for fringes. Still I had no luck. I found the north beam to be rather poorly aligned, so I improved that (though I am sure it makes things worse for Yitping on MUSCA). After searching -1000 to 1000, I more or less gave up, but I sent the offset out to -2000 for the heck of it. When I came back from the kitchen, I discovered I had very good fringes at -1770. After that, observing went very well. Fringes were good on most targets; gam Pav was a bit of trouble, but it was both the dimmest and highest airmass. One last problem was that S2 locked-up in the middle of an observation. It had to be power-cycled. However, I was able to pause the observation, recover, and pick-up where I left off with only a couple of minutes delay. The trick is: on pavo: ssid s2 on s2: oljack (and index and track, of course) Taskmaster also needed a "reopen", but that could wait until the observation finished.