Running Routine

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

It is 6PM or so and I am starting my nightly running routine.  First thing 
is to check the weather.  A look at the "Clear Sky Clock" says that the sky 
will be clear until early morning.  A look at the O'Hare IR Satellite view 
says the thin clouds are to the north and the thunderstorms are to the 
south.  So it looks OK to run.

I then opened up the dome, pull out the coo-coo clock mount, and turned on 
the three systems.  In the process, I checked the cooling water level, and 
the desiccant in the camera dry air loop.  Both looked OK.  TOM1 needed 
water as the cooling system is open and it evaporates away.  TOM2/TOM3 has 
a closed loop system which seldom needs attention.

I then started the three systems running "TemPlt" so that I could watch to 
see that they are cooling down OK.

After sunset, I will switch off the temperature plot and start taking 
data.  Now that there are cuts built into the pipeline, I just turn on at 
dusk and take images.  Eventually they are good and the pipeline sorts all 
this out.

Since I am now networked, I can monitor the three systems from my 
office.  Since I have changed the camera on TOM2 I will particularly check 
it's focus.  Normally, most of the cameras stay focused as good as possible 
from day to day.  If anything shows up looking funny, then I go and 
investigate.

At dawn, I get up.  At 73 I don't sleep through the night anyway so it is 
no big deal to get up and shut down the systems.   I shut down the 
programs, and manually control the telescopes to their park position.  I 
close the dome but if there is no rain expected I leave the coo-coo clock 
mount open since it jiggles the telescope when moved and might require a 
focus run. Then I write the nights data to disk.  Sigh!  I have to do this 
upstairs and downstairs at the moment.  So there is about an hour of disk 
writing downstairs in my workroom and an hour up in the dome.  Sigh!  I can 
do this also by transferring the data to machines in my office, but this is 
a longer process since I can't write on the fly over the network.

These short near summer days this means 15 or so CDs, five from each 
telescope.

All this takes a lot of time.  Four or five hours.  I will work to make it 
more automatic, but the big thing to improve it would be to switch to DVD's 
which would hold a whole night of data for a telescope.  This would save me 
from standing by to switch CDs when they finish.

Meanwhile, I am running the pipeline on four machines.  I have one set up 
for the current data from TOM1, TOM2, and TOM3 and a fourth machine running 
old data from TOM1.  It is important to check the data on the fly.  I lost 
a couple of days on TOM2 from moving the lens.  When we put it back, we 
forgot to clamp the ring and it got in the way of the shutter.  The result 
was a bright line down the center of the images for that camera.  The 
pipeline nicely rejected all the data from those nights.

I am now getting almost a million measurement pairs on a good night when 
everything runs.

So the adventure goes.

Tom Droege