1. Checklist for Opening Up
0. In warm room, power on the telescope by pressing the red button on the surge protector inside the metal electric box on the wall behind the rack with computers.
1. In warm room, turn on both computers (in rack to right of monitors; two black boxes will show green lights if on).
2. In warm room, Login to both computers as: User: Observer (password in notebook).
3. In warm room: On the left computer, double click on the Maxim DL 6 icon (the bluish one with a spectrum on it). Note, that the older MaxIM DL 4 (an icon with a white telescope) is also present on the camera computer and it may (but normally should not!) be used to run the observations.
4. In warm room: On the right computer, double click on the ACE icon. Login as: User: smith (password in notebook)
5. In dome: Make sure the Apogee CCD is on the back of the 24 inch telescope, rather than the eyepiece. Call Laura if it is not. Make sure two cords are plugged into it---a power cord and a USB data cord.
6. In dome: make sure the power strip is plugged into the wall, and turn the power strip on. Outlet strip is taped to the telescope. You should hear a whirring sounds start up from the CCD (these are the camera cooling fans).
7. In dome: Open the dome by pushing and holding down the Open button on the big grey box. Make sure stuff doesn't fall on the telescope; if it does call Laura.
8. In dome: Climb ladder and remove the big mirror cover. Place it in the holder that is attached to the dome.
9. In warm room: In Maxim DL 6, click on View menu and then Camera Control Window. Under Setup in this window, click Connect. Then click Cooler On. You'll want to wait until the CCD is at -25 C before observing (this can take a while, maybe 20 min).
10. In warm room: While waiting for CCD to cool down, in ACE click on Instruments menu at top, and under it select Filter Wheel. This will open a new window. In it, click Initialize.
11. In warm room: In ACE, click on Telescope menu at top, and then select from it Focus. A new window should pop up. Set the focus to an initial guess of 135000 in this window.
12. In warm room: on left computer, in MaxIM DL window on the Exposure tab click on the little triangular arrow icon and select Image Save Path (Image Save Path can also be accessed through the autosave dialog on the same Exposure tab). Create a directory for tonight's data called YYYY_MM_DD at E:\new_data This is where the images will be saved. go to the Images folder and find the directory named for your source. There should be one--if there isn't, make one (name it completely, carefully, and clearly. Don't mistype your source's name!). If you are going to be observing two stars tonight, you'll need to make directories under two sources' names.
Inside that directory, make a subdirectory named with the date (use the format 2015_12_23, which would mean you were observing on December 23, 2015). This is where you will save your images. Move into this directory and plan to save images here.Inside this sub-directory, once you start taking calibration frames, be sure to make separate sub-sub-directories that contain bias frames (call it biases), dark frames (call it darks) and flat field frames (call it flats). If you have flats in multiple filters, save them in different directories. If you are not able to take flats the night of your observations, copy the most recent flats into your directory (that match the filters you plan to use). If you are observing multiple stars tonight, make sure you copy the calibration frames into both stars' directories.
13. In warm room, synchronise time on both Camera and Telescope computer with the GPS-driven NTP server (the small black RaspberryPi box on the telescope mount). Click on the clock on the windows task bar, navigate to Internet time tab and click "Update Now". The update will always fail the first time (Bill Gates knows why) - just click Update Now button again and the update should succeed (you will see a message "successfully updated at TIME"). The IP address of the GPS-NTP box is 192.168.0.32 should already be set. If something breaks and it becomes impossible to update the time using NTP, the last-ditch effort is to manually check the computer time against the time at your smartphone (assuming it gets time from the cell network or GPS). Note that the GPS-NTP box will take 13 minutes to start (it gets powered on together with the cameras). This is because the leap second information is transmitted by GPS satellites every 12.5 minutes and the silly GPS receiver goes back to the factory-set (outdated) number of leap seconds after being powered off.
Once the CCD has cooled to -25 C, you are ready to take data!