20160602 Commissioning Plan

Priorities for test are in the order listed in the plan below.

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Twilight

After Sunset at Az 155 (or Az 0) please take twilight LRS2 and VIRUS exposures that have good flux (more than 10,000 ADU) but not saturated on either LRS2b, LRS2r, or VIRUS.

NOTE: Be sure to use type "twi" instead of type "sci"

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Good Weather

Science Operations:

• Science targets from the EGS list found in hetdex_list for VIRUS
• Take a flux standard with each VIRUS unit
• Take a flux standard with LRS2-B and LRS2-R

No other targets have been submitted at this time.

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Poorish weather but still able to open

Pointing zero points Version 1

Purpose: We are testing a new pier model structureModel.dat.test1 located at /opt/het/hetdex/etc/configfiles. If you need to revert to the original please copy over structureModel.dat.orig.

Procedure:

• cp /opt/het/hetdex/etc/configfiles/structureModel.dat.test1 /opt/het/hetdex/etc/configfiles/structureModel.dat
• Observe a somewhat bright (~6th mag) star at the center of track (within 20 mm) every 15 degrees in Az pointing to the IHMP. You can skip Az 0 and Az 180.
• Make sure that tip-tilt is running and that you are in focus.
• Save an image with ACAM with a exposure of at least 5 seconds and record the star position (x,y in pixels) in the night log along with the Az, tracker X and tracker Y. See the following example:

  Sun May 22 10:58:16 GMT 2016
   u'az': 30.228086,
   u'dec': 57.55186,
   u'dec_2000': 57.473979,
   u'el': 55.060253,
   u'hour_angle': 21.900711,
   u'itf.phi': -0.31734,
   u'itf.rho': -0.878,
   u'itf.t': u'1463914697.570000000',
   u'itf.theta': -0.446872,
   u'itf.x': -77.065537,
   u'itf.y': -102.704068,
   u'itf.z': -1.383,
   u'lst': 20.07067,
   u'offset.focus.w': -2,
   u'offset.sky.x': 0,
   u'offset.sky.y': 0,
   u'offset.tiptilt.p': 0,
   u'offset.tiptilt.t': 0,
   u'parallactic_angle': 53.798219,
   u'ra': 22.16996,
   u'ra_2000': 22.159929,
   u'zenith_distance': 34.939747}
  20160522T105823.6_acm_sci
  star 162 314
  

• when done:

  cp /opt/het/hetdex/etc/configfiles/structureModel.dat.orig /opt/het/hetdex/etc/configfiles/structureModel.dat
  

PV on a star(s)

Purpose: Test algorithms for separating out the RGB components in the color PV camera. Phillip requests that we observe a blue star near center of track.

Procedure:

• Select a BSC with type A or bluer before center of track
• Setup on the star and focus with ACAM on other stars in the field of view
• Pull out the ACAM and insert the PV.
• Center on the PV. It is likely very close to the IHMP center
• Take several PV images

If you have time then also try to get an M type star.

Closed dome engineering tests:

Test EGS setup

See e-mail from Sergey. Steve has setup a number of guide stars using shuffle. It would be good to know if these are realistic.

Procedure:

• Select some of the EGS stars from the hetdex_list in htopx
• Send target to TCS
• (Temporary: Go to ~/sir/egs/)
• Once track has started: run script ~/sir/egs/egs_gs <target name>
• run egs_gs output
• record any errors
• try another EGS target

Example:
[astronomer@mcs ~]$ cd ~/sir/egs/
[astronomer@mcs ~]$ ~/sir/egs/egs_gs CANDELS_West_11
mgp -radec=14.3041,52.908781,gc1,14.2933,52.662861,gc2,14.297,52.845878,wf1,14.3275,52.836006,wf2

If the track is no longer available we could use gstar and just look for these RA and DEC positions and see if they seem reasonable.

Longer Darks

Please take 11 darks of 6 minutes each with VIRUS and 11 darks of 10 minutes each with LRS2.

Flats over time

We'd also like to add getting a larger number of flat exposures to the long-term operations procedures. This is for monitoring small changes in the pixel-to-pixel response for VIRUS over time. The cadence would be about once a week, and after any unit has been pumped and recooled, and we want LDLS 20 flats taking each time for this.

lots of bias datasets for VIRUS

• we want to see if there is any correlation between small changes we see in the structure of the bias and CCD temperature or enclosure temperature. Since many of the CCDs are floating in temperature depending on the enclosure temperature, we may be causing very small changes in bias. We'd like to look for this and any other instability that there might be. So if you're closed or have poor conditions, getting say 10 bias sets distributed through the night and recording the CCD, and enclosure temps for each would be a useful dataset.