vatt:vatt_don_warm_startup_checklist
This is an old revision of the document!
 | Critical point |
 | General principle |
 | Practical guideline |
| Comments & suggestions welcome |
|---|
| Warm Startup / Jun 11, 2024 / P Gabor, M Franz et al. | ✔✘ | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Thermalizing M1 and its mirror cell | |||
| Unless you want to crack the primary mirror, please be careful with the temperature difference between the glass and the air. | |||
| Follow the instructions in Thermalizing M1 | |||
| STARTUP PROPER | |||
| Action in the Dome | |||
| Dome | Open legacy finder telescope objective cover | ||
| Dome | Open the new finder telescope objective cover | ||
| Dome | This may be a good moment to fill the LN2 if your camera requires it. See instructions in a separate document. | ||
| Dome | All doors at points of ingress must be closed when VATT/Don is running in Remote mode. This is a safety measure. If the ALT-AZ-derotator motors are running, opening one of these doors in Remote mode will de-energize the motors for the safety of persons who might have inadvertently placed themselves in harms way. There are five items secured with magnetic switches. Check that they are all engaged: | ||
| 1. Elevator door | |||
| 2. West door (leading to ladder to the roof) | |||
| 3. Staircase door (leading to the staircase) | |||
| 4. Trapdoor on the ladder to the roof | |||
| 5. Scissor lift (must be down) | |||
| Dome | Check all lights off (except for the floodlight operated from Control Room) and, again, be sure to close door to elevator vestibule when leaving | ||
| Control room | Turn on the intercom (pressing the buttons marked Dome West and Dome South, depending on which area you want to monitor more closely; for general use, Dome West is better) | ||
| 15 minutes before sunset | |||
| everywhere | Shutter all windows with blackout shades and curtains (with the exception of the window by the SW porch door in the control room; this can be useful to check the sky brightness visually, as the cameras are very sensitive and may create the false impression that the sky is brighter than it truly is) | ||
| TCS room | M2 PI Controller: turn on; it takes a few minutes to boot (monitor status LEDs) | ||
| TCS room | Turn off light | ||
| 2nd lvl lobby | Close doors to silo and to the instrument room (air flow management) | ||
| Control room | TURN ON VIDEO MONITORS for the legacy Dome, FinderScope and Porch Sky camera feeds, as well as the dome floodlight (left of the SW balcony door) | ||
| Control room | Enable Live View from the Hikvision dome, the Hikvision new FinderScope camera, and the Axis thermal IR P12 camera (Dome, Security Finderscope Cameras) | ||
| Control room | Enable Derotator tracking if disabled: click on the derotator position field, opening a small dialog box, and toggle the tracking there, then close dialog box | ||
| Control room | Start INDI server (double click desktop icon): a terminal appears; you may minimize it | ||
| Control room | Start “Secondary and Guidebox” GUI using the desktop launcher. This will open a Firefox browser window should Firefox not be running yet. If Firefox is already running, an error message will appear. Simply open a Firefox tab manually and go to localhost:4002/guidebox_4k.html. Select VATTSpec or VATT4k (default for all other instruments). The top controls the M2 PI hexapod and the bottom controls various motors in and on the Guide box. The diagram and the text output box scale with CTRL+/- (or CTRL and mouse scroll wheel). Other elements scale when the window is resized. | ||
| Control room | Start autocollimation (more detailed instructions are in a separate document): Press Connect button; field surrounding button should turn green; press Reference button; field surrounding it turns yellow(ish); wait for it to turn green; press Auto Collimate button; M2 will move to previous night's final positions | ||
| Control room | Connect the Guidebox part of the GUI to the hardware by pressing the Connect button. After any loss of power to the Guidebox you must click Reference (the procedure takes several minutes). Use the Initialize button if one of the axes becomes unresponsive (e.g., stuck in a limit). In more extreme cases, e.g., coming out of lightning shutdown, the guide box is likely to run into communication problems. The remedy is to run the INDImon script (its launcher on VATTcontrol's desktop is labeled Restart indidriver), selecting option (3) Filter/Guidebox driver (to the following query, type “Y” followed by Enter). | ||
| Control room | Start PHD2 (double click desktop icon): your main reference should be a separate dedicated document; instructions that follow here are simplified | ||
| Control room | PHD2: Main tool bar, click icon that looks like a USB male connector: connect equipment window appears | ||
| Control room | PHD2: connect equipment, in the camera row, click on the icon that looks like a screwdriver and wrench in an “X”: INDI Configuration window should appear | ||
| Control room | PHD2: INDI Configuration window: click the INDI button near the bottom of the window: INDI options window appear | ||
| Control room | PHD2: INDI Options window: select Apogee CCD tab, check network settings, and click the connect button in the Connection field: after a few seconds, a bunch of new fields and tabs appears. (The message “[ERROR] Model is not supported by the INDI Apogee driver” may mean that the camera is not powered up.) In the Main tab, check that the cooling system is on: Click Cooler on. In the image settings tab, set binning to 8×8: type 8 in the two boxes and hit Set. A green bullet should appear on the left. | ||
| Control room | PHD2: Close the two INDI-related windows. Back in the Connect Equipment window click the Connect buttons for Camera and Mount (PEPSI: do not connect Mount). Ignore error message, “Bad-pixel map does not match camera…” If the Mount does not connect the first time (there may be an error message), try clicking the “Connect” again. | ||
| Control room | Start XEPHEM (double click desktop icon) | ||
| Control room | XEPHEM: main window: click “Now” on top right and “Update” in bottom bar, then toggle the small “RT” button to the right of Looping 1); check that the bottom bar says Stop | ||
| Control room | XEPHEM: Open SKY VIEW window: go to the pull-down menu View, and select the penultimate item, Sky view | ||
| Control room | XEPHEM: SKY VIEW window: We used to click grid control (under Images menu) twice, turning RA–DEC grid off and then Alt–Az grid on. This does not seem to work anymore. In the “Control” pull-down menu select “Options”, which opens a new window, and toggle “Alt-Az” at the top left of the window. | ||
| Control room | Start Trouble Report (TRVATT): In menu bar at top of vattcontrol desktop, start Firefox; Trouble Report page will open (https://cbtest.as.arizona.edu/mtnops-trouble-report/). Use the VATT Weather Dashboard (wfrog, the 3 Hours tab). Fill in pertinent fields along top (Observer(s), Instrument, Operator(s), etc.). | ||
| TELESCOPE “Go Live” SEQUENCE COMPLETE | |||
| Control room | It is highly advisable to collimate the telescope using a star in the vicinity of your science target field. | ||
| Control room | When slewing, WATCH  the telescope to see whether it is moving as envisaged. BE READY with software stop (hover mouse over “STOP” button). | ||
| Control room | XEPHEM SKY VIEW WINDOW: Identify a collimation object (magnitude < 7). Use XEPHEM GoTo function. | ||
| Control room | Paddle: Jog selected object into finder telescope monitor cross hairs | ||
| Control room | TCSglue main window: Init co-ords (do this again because it will improve localized pointing: collimation object is in the vicinity of the science target) | ||
| Control room | Check/optimize telescope focus with science instrument prior to collimation | ||
| Control room | “Autocollimation” must be running throughout the collimation & focusing procedure! | ||
| Control room | Adjust focus with Secondary GUI, taking an exposure with the science camera, and when using the 4k CCD Imager, evaluate the distribution curve fit in IRAF xgterm | ||
| Control room | Guidebox GUI: insert Center field pickoff mirror | ||
| Control room | Use PHD2 to observe the object. If the image is noisy, you may need to check whether PHD2 is correctly processing the image. Open the Darks pull-down menu and select Use dark library. A tick-mark appears to the left. Refer to PHD2's help files. | ||
| Control room | Paddle: push collimation object to center of guider monitor @ rate of 5 sec/sec. DO NOT USE GUIDER STAGES TO CENTER OBJECT. | ||
| Control room | Guidebox GUI: defocus to obtain “donut” (offset -30) | ||
| Control room | Secondary GUI: adjust TipX, TipY to even out light distribution in “donut”, re-centering object with paddle | ||
| Control room | Guidebox GUI: refocus (eliminate/adjust offset; it will be a value close to 0) | ||
| Control room | Guidebox GUI: select U-mirror | ||
| Control room | Check/optimize telescope focus with science instrument (after collimation) | ||
| Collimation & focusing completed | |||
| Control room | Select target and use XEPHEM GoTo function. Monitor the telescope motion during slewing. | ||
| Control room | Use Paddle to center target in the Finder | ||
| Control room | VATT 4k CCD Imager only: Take image with main science camera to check the field; use paddle to adjust; re-initialize coordinates as required | ||
| Target acquired | |||
| Control room | Instructions for guiding are provided in a separate document. Briefly, once you have a guide star, click on it. A yellowish frame appears. Open the Tools pull-down menu, select Modify calibration > Clear calibration data, answer in the affirmative when asked whether you know what you are doing, and click on the green Guide icon in the main tool bar. PHD2 will perform a calibration of the corrective motions and start guiding. | ||
| Control room | IRAF In order to work with multi-extension fits files in IRAF, load mscred in IRAF (typing mscred), and use mscexam command to interact with ds9 (rather than imexam). | ||
1)
These steps were unnecessary at one stage of software development.
vatt/vatt_don_warm_startup_checklist.1718144516.txt.gz · Last modified: 2024/06/11 15:21 by paul
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