[Comm2011] Daily reports and OBJECTS

[helmich]

Hi everyone,

Sorry for not keeping you entirely up to date. Somehow sending emails like
this always ends up taking at least half an hour, partly because I'm using
the Kapteyn webmail because (it looks like) the Kapteyn smtp server can not
be used from here (that's mentioned in the Paranal documentation, though
Koen has no issues mailing). Something to do with the DG maybe. 

I've brought up the issue of observing logs early on. Unfortunately as long
as we are not using P2PP etc. there is no standard for keeping logs. So
everyone has bits and pieces. I've mostly been working on an in-between
schedule; getting up around 8AM. and going down around 1 at night. Koen has
been keeping to a night schedule, so have Andrea and Pietro.

The major issues:
1)
Pietro was very cooperative about the PSF issues. He thinks there may be a
misalignment between M1 and M2 that is causing the anisotropy. Pietro, Koen
and Thomas Szeifert have been mostly involved in discussing this and
determining what to observe to help Pietro and the VST team as much as
possible if they are to correct this. Guess what Koen has hacked together
in a day? A program to do what we do in the MIDAS procedure automatically.

2) 
Saturation at below 65000 ADU (i.e. 57000 ADU). The FIERA signal is
filtered. This is intended to reduce (readout) noise. According to Thomas
there are 3 settings for this filter. A side effect can be this saturation
below 2^16. The actual effect depends on the dynamic range of the pixel
values; bright stars on a high sky background will saturate at higher ADU
than bright stars on a low sky background.

Olaf switched to a less aggressive filtering. This results in an increase
of readout noise from ~2.2 to ~2.8 ADU.

Dietrich wants to look at linearity in the photometry related to this. I
believe technically this is a Comm2 task, but it may be helpful to look at
the exposures taking for this purpose (images of an SA field taken with 1x,
2x, 3x an exposure time. (I"ll see if I can dig up the precise images).

I'll send a few plots I made in the next mail.

Ewout


On Wed, 30 Mar 2011 17:18:07 +0200 (CEST), "John P. McFarland"
<mcfarland at astro.rug.nl> wrote:
> Hi Ewout,
> 
> In organizing ourselves, we forgot one of the most basic steps: regular
> communication over daily happenings.  Could you take a few minutes each
> day
> to e-mail us a brief run-down of the day's activities and of the general
> conditions (e.g., your general schedule (working in the day or the
night),
> main tasks, templates run, weather, general atmosphere, etc.)?  This
> includes the previous days of OCM1A for archive purposes.  We understand
> that everybody is likely very busy, but this report should only take a
few
> minutes each day.  If it take significantly longer, it's too much detail.
> Thanks for you efforts here.
> 
> Also, we noticed some basic header information is missing, most notably,
a
> proper OBJECT descriptor for science templates.  Please let us know what
> the
> idea for this is there (Is there no facility to update this information?
> Is it stored in a non-standard keyword? etc.)
> 
> Lastly, for my own interest, what is the progress of the astrometry
> keywords
> in the headers.
> 
> Thanks for all the good work!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 
> -=John