Day 1: 12/06/22:
- Transferred the DIMSUM code to my external hard drive. Any Mac Mini that was setup according to the Mac Mini Setup in this wiki will be able to use it. In the device open the terminal and run the command:
cd /Volumes/Ali Media/stubbs_code . After this, you can execute the desired script. The images will be saved in the directory stubbs_code which is in the external disk. Failed to mount the camera. The clamp was not strong enough to hold the camera on its own.
Day 2: 12/07/22:
- Mounted the camera using two clamps and an L rail. Clamped the L rail to the orange rail shown in DIMSUM presentation. The camera is stable in the vertical direction, but it is moves very easily in azimuthal direction. Currently this helps adjust the camera angle but we need a solution for the long term. The video clip shows that the camera is not affected by the rotation of the dome.
- Mounted the pegboard to the railing and camera is in the same plane with the pegboard. It can see everything. We may need further stabilization of the pegboard on the other direction to avoid the tilt. The camera can see the entire pegboard without any barriers. It is a decent height above the ground. Attached below are the pegboard, the tilt, and how the camera sees it.
Day 3: 12/08/22:
- It was a day of unexpected problems. The telescope rotated and hindered the view of the camera and the angle. Craig had told us such a degree of rotation would not happen.
- The instability of the camera makes it rotate in small disruptions which is a significant problem. I did some trials to see if the vibration caused by taking high speed pictures rotated the camera. Two runs of high speed pictures (22 pictures) did not seem to affect it. However, it may cause the same problem as the last time as Clay. In an hour of data taking and in the 1000'th photo, it may end up causing a significant shift and wrong differential image motion measurements. The picture below is the shifted and obstructed pegboard and camera when I looked at it first thing in the morning. The top left corner is affected.
- Looking at this. It different than the photo from the Yesterday's log. I noted this issue down and attempted to fix in the afternoon.
- For the rest of the morning, I checked whether the camera was able to take pictures of flashlights and how did the sources look like. I will attach the Jupyter Notebook as well.
- Sources looked compact (not as bad as the Clay Telescope hot air gun sources) but there were apparent ghosting effects. I checked whether the ghosting effects were significant or just an artifact of the colormap. When I plotted the values of the row of the actual sources it was Gaussian with peak 3598, and the when I plotted the row of the ghost it was also a gaussian with peak 1100. That is a very close.
- We checked if:
- The tilt of the pegboard was causing different focus throughout the shot because of the slight variation in distance. Turns out not and the small tilt actually puts the camera and pegboard in the same plane. I checked the focus in two ways:
- Zooming in on the sm1 light sources across the pegboard and see if they are blurry.
- Zooming in on the circles of the pegboard and see if they are circular.
- Both of the outcomes could be better but it was as good as the time I get decent sources in Clay telescope.
- I note that the pegboard does not seem fully perpendicular on the screen. Elana and I had decided it was not the biggest of our problems.
- The second possibility of ghosting was that the fibers were not tight enough with the SM1. To address that issue, I switched one of the SM1 sources with a plain bolt Elana used when she did this experiment. The sources were identical. So it was not a problem of SM1's. This makes sense because SM1's properly tight. However, this may require a recheck. Attached below is the SM1 and the bolt next to it, they are at the top left. Also this shows the obstruction more clearly:
- The tilt of the pegboard was causing different focus throughout the shot because of the slight variation in distance. Turns out not and the small tilt actually puts the camera and pegboard in the same plane. I checked the focus in two ways:
- In the afternoon, we decided that the camera being very free to move and obstructed by the telescope was not okay. First we changed the location of the pegboard. That was a fairly easy fix. New location of the pegboard with optical fibers. It is one rail below than the picture in previous day. The reason we are not using the rectangular rails rather than the circular ones that they ended up being more stable with the clamps.
I could not take a picture of the unobscured view because a new problem arose.
The new problem: Camera does not take a picture of the flash sources anymore!
- While we were trying to make the camera more stable, which is very hard to do.
- The struggle of the camera stabilization (a digression): The set screw on the moving part of the clamp has to be loosened, then the clamp screw (the visible black knob) has to be loosened the camera has to point to the desired place. After pointing at the desired place, one must hold it while both the clamp and set screw is being tightened. If only one of them is tight then the camera moves from its intended location. Set screw alone makes it pretty stable, clamp by itself does not make it stable at all. The combination of them gets it in the stable position in the yesterdays log I mentioned. The azimuthal instability is still a problem and as it rotates azimuthally it gets loser. It is a positive feedback loop.
- During the process outlined above we gave too much weight to the camera and clamp went down.
- It also appeared that lens of the camera was loosened. It can be tightened by the set screws it has, however, the holes are too small and screws are flat head. Our flathead screwdrivers is not small enough to get in to these holes. We were still able to tighten it good enough.
- When I tried to take pictures after all the corrections, the flashes did not appear in the photos. I applied the scientific method to find out what was wrong:
- Are all the components on. The easy fixes:
- The camera is pointing to the pegboard and Eos Utility live shooting shows the pegboard.
- The remote flash trigger is on.
- The remote receiver is on and is receiving the signal.
- The Xenon lamp is powered.
These were all properly working
- Does the flashlight come out of the initial optical fiber before it reaches the filters? It does.
- Does it go through the filters successfully. I removed the filters from the apparatus to put filters between two optical fibers. ND 1.8 may have been too much to see the light. I saw that light travels through the apparatus.
- Does it reach to the end of 1 to 7 optical fiber. It does.
- Elana suggested that maybe the flashlight somehow got dimmer and and ND filter of 1.8 would be too much. Following that suggestion, I removed the ND filters and made the of apparatus simply a bypass. When I was going to run the test, I got kicked out of the dome because my time was up. Elana told me she still was not able to see the sources in the pictures with no ND filters. She also said she might have made a simple mistake. I will try again tomorrow.
- Are all the components on. The easy fixes:
Summary of the current situation after three days:
The logistical situation:
- I have only 6 days left to get this done.
- Hopefully I will be able to stay a few night next week and work on the project 17 hours rather than only 7 hours.
What is working or has worked before:
- We found ways to mount the camera and pegboard without a tripod which would possibly disturb movement in the AuxTel Dome
- We found ways to make the pegboard and camera face each other, above ground. It needs further stabilization.
- We can take pictures of the flash sources and relatively make instant analysis with highly abstracted code.
- The extension chords and the lengths of the connections (both optical fibers and the length of power chord of the Xenon lamp) makes it possible to wires to have an indirect path, such as under the gratings, and still get to their destination.
- It is not interfering with the dome illumination system that Patrick and Parker are installing!
- The data can be taken directly to an external disk without filling the memory of the computer (we need another external disk other than personal one).
What has to be fixed:
- Firstly, the most importantly, we need to be able to take pictures of the flashlights again.
- We need to stabilize the camera.
- Figure out the focusing issue and make sure to get centeroidable sources.
- Optionally add another type of support to pegboard.
Plan forward:
- Fix the emergency fixes.
- Add all the possible sources to the pegboard. The more the merrier.
- Find out an ND filter combination that accounts for the divided light that have different brightness. The different brightness should not matter because we expect the shape to be the same as long as they are visible and not saturated.
- Make sure we get a distribution of sources that makes the DIM value with respect to distance saturate so that we can correlate with fwhm of the observations when the time comes.
- At this point it should be ready for further tests and data collection
- Test whether the light from the sources affect the telescope dome.
- If not:
- Tie the optical fibers to the rail to address the trip hazard.
- Run the cables under the grating.
- If it is, try not to make it affect:
- Either increase the value of the ND filters.
- Put SM1 tubes to the sources and wiling to be sacrifice the number of sources.
- If nothing works, do the server connection Tiago asked.
- If not:
- Once the test of dome interference is done, make a night test taking actual data and try to correlate the saturated differential image motion data with the fwhm.
- Do not forget to enjoy the stars and the experience the Magellanic Clouds.
Day 4: 12/09/22:
- 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.
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.