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• The sources from the day before with ghosting effects before the camera and flashes get out of phase, for some reason camera did not take pictures of the flashes:
  
  I only was able to take a screenshot of the 4 sources but they give the essential idea. These images should not be considered other than observing that sources were initially not good. The left panels is the initial trial and right one is after a focus change. These trials made us realize that we need to fix the camera movement issue.
• We tried to figure out why the photos were out of sync with the sources. We could not figure it out why it had worked before and stopped working. Then we just decided to average out any latency by just making the exposure 1/200 seconds rather than 1/2000. That made it work.
• We remounted the camera and made it more sturdy. We discovered we cannot fully get rid of the azimuthal rotation since that is required to unscrew the camera from its mount. If the mount would not let it do that, then it would really be wrong design.
• We reoriented the camera and its mount in a way that camera can be tightened, loosened, and moved much easier compared to previous style. Also, now the camera is sturdy enough to hold itself up by only tightening the big screw on its side. The set screw only gives additional security. In the images below it can be seen that the set screw is easily reachable.
  
• I had designed the system in a way that the images are written directly into the external disk. That made the external disk and the program crash eventually. So now the images are stored in the internal disk and then transferred when the data collection is done. An hour of data collection approximately takes 60GB so if there is nothing else on the computer a 4 hour run will be possible before the computer runs out of memory. If needed, we may write a python script to automate the process. We also bought a solid state disk to avoid disk crashes.

• We tested how much do the flashes from the circuit affect the observations in terms of background light. This was to determine whether we would need a server that communicates with the telescope. Below is a table of the runs we made. We took flats with and without the flashes on and compared the ADU. Auxiliary Telescope (AT) elevation of 20 degrees is the minimum it would get, that is also the closest height it would be to the flashing lights. AT azimuth of 215 is the most direct pointing of AT mirror to the flash light. The reason we took many trials was simply a failure to get ideal conditions such as screens being turned on.

  Exposure ID	Exposure Time (s)	filter	AT azimuth	AT elevation	flash (y/n)	ND filter	computer screen status
  10	60	none	270	20	n	0	all on
  11	60	none	270	20	y	0	all on
  12	60	none	270	20	n	1	all on
  13	60	none	270	20	y	1	all on
  14	50	none	270	20	n	1	Ali, Elana screens off
  15	50	none	270	20	n	1	all screens off
  16	60	none	270	20	y	1	all screens off
  17	30	none	270	20	n	1	Elana's screen on for a bit
  18	30	none	270	20	y	1	all screens off
  19	30	none	270	20	n	1	all screens off
  20	30	none	215	20	n	1	all screens off
  21	30	none	215	20	y	1	all screens off

  Overall results of the daytime testing were:

  • If there is no ND filter lights do have a significant affect.
  • With ND 1, which is way smaller than what we are going to have, the flashes do not cause additional background lighting that would possibly disturb the observations azimuth of 270 and elevation at 20. At azimuth of 215, flashlight do have an effect but it is still less compared to the typical background of 50 ADU.
  • We used 7 sources with ND1, in the actual setup, we will use an ND 1.6 filter. It will be true that there will be more sources, but the total light would be the same.
  • These suggest that we don't need to be concerned about DIMSUM affecting auxtel observations.
  • We will verify these numbers in a fully dark night dome.
  • We did not test shorter observations because AuxTel does not take shorter observations than 30 seconds "to do science" as Craig said.
    
    
• We took data with the new fixed camera and the pegboard. Below are the sources with ND 1.6:
  
  The bottom source looks very nice. Being able to get such a nice source shows that we have a focusing issue and pegboard and cameras line of sight may not be fully perpendicular. Also, brightness of the sources are different which should not be the case. In the Clay Telescope observations, I was able to get all the sources to some extent focused, however, they were closer to each other in the image space and on the pegboard itself. It is harder to keep focus on a wider range. That said, the sources are not saturated with the ND 1.6 filter. Below are the graphs of the nice source, the source above the nice one, and a dimmer source:
  
  They all look Gaussian.
• Finally, I took a picture of the pegboard just before I closed everything. I am going to do the same thing again on Monday and compare the two images. Below is the final picture.
  
• Things to do on Monday with priority different than the plan forward above:
  • Fix the pegboard orientation.

12/12/22: Day 5:

• Wrote a script in the weekend to transfer initially internally written files to an external disk while keep taking data. It takes four arguments, path/to/source (where the files are internally saved), path/to/target (the directory of the external disk), file type, number of files to transfer after. That would let us write the files into the internal disk and transfer them over while keep taking more data and never run out of local memory. The video below is a demonstration with a threshold of 50 files. I wrote a dummy bash script to create files with increasing numbers and wrote it to a directory:
  

  View file
  name IMG_2319.MOV height 250

• There was a mild earthquake during the weekend. Nothing significant happened to the setup.
• We further stabilized the pegboard. It still moves but is not completely like a sail.
• Added additional sources by adding 1 to 4 optical fibers to the ends of 1 to 7 optical fibers. Some of the 1 to 4 optical fibers did not work anymore.
• We technically should be able to get 18 sources. However, while some sources after being divided the 4 are sufficiently bright, others could barely be seen. I do not currently know the reason behind this problem.
• Tomorrow will be the observing night of DIMSUM, Elana and I are dealing with ssh issues. I am trying to get access to the actual network rather than a guest.
• Currently sources are not perfect Gaussians, some of them are decent. It may be a plane of focus issue.
• If the issues are not fixed, I will only work with clearly seen sources, Get a mock DIMSUM run and hope for the best for a data that would be good for a paper.

Stubbs comments- 

This looks like great progress, bravo. We need to be sure the cables and other elements are not trip hazards, and so I suggest running them under the grating floor somebow. Also the camera isn't pointed quite in the direction I was expecting but I'm sure you guys have that figured out. Finally, we need to be sure we aren't obstructing the new in-dome illumination system that Patrick and Parker are installing. 
Happy to arrange a time to talk over zoom tomorrow if you like. 
 

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