OBSERVER'S MANUAL

Jill Bechtold
jill AT as.arizona.edu
last update: April 23, 2008

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Power Up
3. Filling the dewar
4. Running the CCD
5. Choosing a slit
6. Running the Slit Viewer from optics2
7. In the afternoon:
        a. Focus the slit viewer
        b. Focus the spectrograph
    c. Bias frames
        d. Lamps
8. At the beginning of the night:
        a.
9. Observing
10. Quick Look reductions
11. At the end of the night:
12. Take home your data
13. Power down
14. At the end of the run:
15. The Prelim from Hell: What's wrong now?

A gallery of images with problems.

1. Introduction

MAESTRO is mounted at f/5, and uses the f/5 spectroscopic corrector optics and ADC. Please read the full description of the instrument on the WIKI site, as well as the "NEWS" section, which contains current updates. This document is a description of how to operate MAESTRO.

2. Power Up

a. If the spectrograph needs to be powered up, assuming it is cabled up and ready to go, do the following:

Turn on the grey electronics box which hangs on the telescope. This powers up the Galil electronics (which runs the stepper motors), the Pullizi (which turns calibration lamps on and off) and the Temptrax temperature sensors. The "on" switch is the white switch on the side next to the cables. Up is on.

Turn on the CCD box and boot maestroccd. The CCD electronics, slit viewer electronics, slit viewer cooler and shutter electronics are in the black box hanging on the opposite side of the spectrograph from the grey electronics box.

Turn on the power to the box by flipping the

3. Running the CCD

The detector is a 4096x4096 thinned, back illuminated CCD, built by Mike Lesser's group at ITL. It is read out with 2 amps, so there are two overscan strips. The CCD is run by a computer called " maestroccd " which is a headless Window box in the large black CCD electronics box which hangs on the spectrograph. AZCam software in the maestroccd computer controls the CCD, and talks to the user interface, which is the familiar ICE in the IRAF environment on the alewife computer in the control room.

Log on to alewife as user mmtobs. The password is in the drawer in the control room.

If you are unfamiliar with IRAF, click here for a brief introduction to help you do simple observing and examining of data.

Make sure the .bashrc looks like this:

[mmtobs@alewife ~]$ more .bashrc
# .bashrc

#Source global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
. /etc/bashrc
fi

# User specific aliases and functions
export AZCAMHOST=maestroccd.mmto.arizona.edu
[mmtobs@alewife ~]$

Change the detpars so that the detector is "maestro"

ccdacq> lpar detpars
(firstcol = 1) First column of data (device coordinates)
(lastcol = 4096) Last column of data (device coordinates)
(firstrow = 1) First row of data (device coordinates)
(lastrow = 4096) Last row of data (device coordinates)
(colbin = 2) Column binning factor
(rowbin = 2) Row binning factor
(preflash = 0) Preflash time in seconds
(gain = 0) Instrumental gain setting (0 for default)
(detinfo = "") Optional image header info about detector
(detcap = "runlib$detcap") Detector capabilities file
(detname = "maestro") Detector name
(mode = "ql")
ccdacq>

The CCD is read out with two amps, so there are two 20 pixel wide overscan strips. In unbinned mode, the CCD format is shown below.

4. Choose a slit

SLIT PLATES
Slit No.	Size in microns	Size in arcsec.	Spectral resolution, Recommended binning	Sample Exposures of Cal Lamps
Slit 1	28 micron square	0.3 arcsec square
Slit 2	95 micron by 255 micron	1 arcsec x 2.7 arcsec
Slit 3	95 x 331 micron	1 arc sec x 3.5 arc sec
Slit 4		0.3 x 1 arc sec dual slit separated by 0.7 arcsec
Slit 5	66 x 95 separated by 66 micron	0.7 x 1 arcsec dual slit separated by 0.7 arcsec
Slit 6	95 x 95 separated by 66 micron	1 x 1 arc sec dual slit separated by 0.7 arc sec
Slit 7	118 x 95 separated by 66 micron	1.25 x 1 arc sec dual slit separated by 0.7 arcsec.
Slit 8		0.3 x 1 arc sec dual slit separated by 1.5 arcsec
Slit 9	66 x 95 separated by 142 micron	0.7 x 1 arc sec dual slit separated by 1.5 arc sec
Slit 10	95 square separated by 142 micron	1 arc sec square dual holes separated by 1.5 arc sec
Slit 11		1.25 x 1 arcsec dual slit separated by 1.5 arc sec
Slit 12		1 x 4.5 arc sec slit
Slit 13	66 x 255	.7 x 2.7 arc sec slit.
Slit 14		Lettering, use to focus slit viewer
Slit 15		Milky Flat
Several large holes, used mainly for alignment in the lab

5. Power up the Slit Viewer

Make sure the black electronics box hanging on the spectrograph is powered on, and the maestroccd computer is booted.

a. To run the slit viewer from optics2.mmto.arizona.edu (Jill's linux box in the lab):

On optics2.mmto.arizona.edu, log on as user mobserver

cd /home/mobserver/bin
./vncviewer

A window should appear to begin a log on dialog.
The computer is maestroccd.mmto.arizona.

In the Windows display, click on the icon which says "Start Guider". The tcl script which runs the guider will start up.