Monthly Archives: December 2016

Week of December 26th

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It has been quiet during the day at the HET this week with day staff on holiday. If the weather clears the night staff will be plenty busy working through the queue. The current weather outlook for the week is cloudy with possible showers. Monday night we were able to do science through thin clouds and successfully collected data for many programs that do not require perfect seeing or zero cloud cover. The bulk of the science data collected in the beginning of the week has been with LRS2-B and LRS2-R. Fingers crossed the weather clears as we approach the new moon on Thursday.

Week of December 19th

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This week has been an exciting week ramping up to science.  The Board of Visitor Staff Excellence Award Winners were announced by Director Armandroff and are as follows: Henry Cantu, Angela Davis, Steve Odewahn, and Trent Peterson.  Congratulations to the winners.

We are quickly moving in to science mode with the upcoming new moon.  Currently this week the first half of each night is being used primarily for science with the second half used for engineering due to the moon.  The weather looks to be clearing over the holiday weekend, so hopefully we will be able to collect some good data for the HET community!

The week of December 12

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This week we are firmly back in our 2 weeks of engineering time. The big news is that we were able to get the wave-front sensors to properly operate in closed loop mode. This means that we are able to optimize our image quality during a trajectory small tweaks to the overall tip and tilt of the corrector above the primary mirror.

The mirror teams has kept up their rapid pace of pulling mirrors out of the array and putting in recoated mirrors. The current swap rate is 1.67 segments per week with 69 segments having been swapped since 29 February.

The week of December 11

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This week marks the first full week of the new trimester (December – March). During this period we will be observing for 2 weeks around the new moon with LRS2-B and LRS2-R and to a very limited extent the first 16 units of VIRUS for science projects from our partners. We have 27 separate projects from our 4 partners. During this first week of the new trimester we took data for 10 programs.

During the 2 weeks around the full moon we will be concentrating on engineering but we may if it does not impose any constraint on the engineering obtain a few science targets during grey and bright time.

It is good to be back online taking science data.