ARC 3.5-m Instrument News Page

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Apache Point Observatory
New Mexico, USA

MISC

2015-06-03: A swap of loads back to our new UPS#5. All temporary power services have been taken away. Power has been restroed to a nominal status.

2015-01-31: A catastrophic failure of UPS#5 on the intermediate level led to the loss of power to the telescope and most of the instruments. We were able to restore power to all but Triplespec. Will troubleshoot further on Monday. The UPS will need repair or replacement. The systems are being run off other UPS units temporarily.
2014-06-16: The guider matching scripts have now been completely updated to work with the modified time keywords in the various image header of guiders and science cameras. They are also backward compatable for older than August, 2013, headers. See note from 2012-08-28. In addition, more information on these scripts can be found here.

2013-08-30: All instrument headers are now on TAI time.

As of August 30, 2013, the 3.5-m has implemented a TAI time standard in all the instrument headers. All time keywords are referenced to TAI. In an effort to make all time keywords the same from instrument to instrument several keywords are no longer being written to some instrument headers. The standard keywords are: TIMESYS, UTC-TAI, UT1-TAI, LST, DATE-OBS (TAI time at start of exposure in year-month-day-hour:minute:second format), and EXPTIME. Every effort has been made to give users the minimum number of time related keywords in which they can recreate any of the old keywords on their own in post imaging processing.

2012-11-16: UT1 and likely LST in several instrument headers was intermittently wrong from fall 2012 by a significant amount (+12 hours). Other time stamp keywords in the various instrument headers is correct. It was fixed on 2012-11-16.

2012-08-28: Users should be reminded that there are scripts available on Newton to match up science image numbers to respective guider images. These scripts can be run after your scheduled time for a log matching the two data sets. More information can be found here. UPDATE: after the changes made to the time keywords on the fits headers. Many of these match scripts are no longer compatable for data taken after 2013-08-30 and therefore will not work. Contact Bill Ketzeback for more information. (Feb 6, 2014 - B.Ketzeback)

The instrument UPS (#6) was brought down on 2013-06-04 to replace a bad fan. The instruments DIS, SPIcam, TSpec and all their associated hardware needed to be powered down for this work. Each was brought back up successfully and tested in the afternoon.

2012-02-08: The Bright and Dim Quartz (Flat Field) Truss lamps have been upgraded. APO staff will update the instrument user guides for up to date exposure times shortly. More information on using the lamps (for taking flat fields with DIS) can be found here.