2015 Dec CHARA AO Run JDM

2015-12-07T06:16:24Z

192.153.157.221:

2015 Dec CHARA AO Run JDM

2015-12-07T05:45:24Z

192.153.157.221:

2011-07-07T23:11:58Z

192.153.157.221:

2011 Jul 07

Check on Action Items:
* SR: no progress with new quotes for M4 DM
* CS: send a report earlier about the
* LS: Did send a ZEMAX of M1-6 to JDM
* Simulations
* Real-time architecture

New Action Items:
* JDM will update documention here with Chris Shelton's memo
* Collect feaures we need in this system, e.g. be able to image the laser going out,
stimulus, IR beacon, acquisition camera,
* How is angle beacon going to function? can we have a separate tip-tilt MIRROR for the lab loop? not cheap .. probably will use offsets to the WFS.
* Can we do this ALL in NIR? or do we need to use a visible WFS for star light?
* Cool idea is to use beacon for everything! keep current system! choose wavelength like 1.3 micron (laser interference issue).
* Stuff for FAST-WFS camera and RT architecture. Quick study -- see previous meeting
* Ask VEGA/PAVO about using 0.96 micron light for the beacon ( can be then be
stimulus for telescope AO WFS as well as lab slow WFS)
* Bring-up sequence for how to not screw up current performance.
* Shear issue for the slow WFS. If we add 2 extra reflections to when we the slow WFS, we could do SHEAR control -- which would be GREAT!!! (who will do this? Theo?)
* not funded to do dicroic switcher -- but we need to try to do it anyway somehow!!
* We want to move forward to ask Keck Foundation for phase II
* Theo has a dropbox directory for this

CHARA AO: Second Meeting

2011-07-07T23:07:49Z

192.153.157.221: New page: 2011 Jul 07 Check on Action Items: * SR: no progress with new quotes for M4 DM * CS: send a report earlier about the * LS: Did send a ZEMAX of M1-6 to JDM * Simulations * Real-time archi...

CHARA AO

2011-07-07T22:06:57Z

192.153.157.221:

Funded in 2011 May

===Meeting Notes===
[[CHARA AO: First Meeting]] CHARA First Meeting 2011May24

[[CHARA AO: Second Meeting]] CHARA Second Meeting 2011Jul07

===Documentation===

[[Media:CHARAAO_ZEMAX_v0.1]]

Xiao's 2011May run

2011-05-22T08:55:59Z

192.153.157.221:

May 8th

1. find the best focus for luminous 5 and 6
We mount a visible fiber to one stage and shoot visible light in from the other end.
Moving z axis manually to make sure the spot bounce off the parabola mirror maintain
similar size to a long distance, which means we find rough focus position.
Then we search XY position by letting the spot go through an alignment telescope, and look at
the spot size and shape on wall.
Then we adjust the alignment telescope to infinity by placing a mirror in front of it, and find the
two clear grid image. Now we try to adjust z axis of luminous stage manually again to find a finer
focus by looking at the spot through the telescope (BE care to reduce light first before looking in to
the telescope)

2. re-find focus position for beam 1 AND 2 AND 3
Since we replaced all the actuators on luminous stages with new ones, we have to find the focus positions
for all the stages.
For beam 1, 2 and 3, because they still use the same infrared fibers, the fiber should stay at the best focus
positions as before, which means you don't need to adjust the pickoff mirror.
We shoot laser into the MIRC vgroove and align it with CHARA beam on the alignment telescope. First place
a beamsplitter in between MIRC light and CHARA beam, and a retro near the beamsplitter:

mirror ==> alignment telescope
/\
||
MIRC light = = > beamsplitter <= = CHARA beam
|| /\
\/ ||
retro

Second, place the CHARA beam in the center of telescope by adjusting beamsplitter, retro, and mirror.
Third, overlap the CHARA beam with MIRC light by moving XYZ axis through FE gui.

Be care when looking into the telscope, reduce the laser or waring a goggles.

May 9th

1. change the fiber on luminous stage 4
shoot laser into MIRC vgroove. Moving XYZ axises to overlap with CHARA beam using the method above.
then change to new infrared fiber, and align again. Hopefully the best positions are close

2. mount luminous stages 5 and 6
shoot laser into MIRC vgroove, and move the pickoff mirror to overlap with CHARA beam.
Then change to the MIRC infrared fiber, and do this again by moving XYZ of luminous stages.

By now, we have six infrared fiber plugged in and well focused, and roughly aligned with CHARA beam.

May 10th

1. assemble new MIRC hardware pieces
Only assemble the MIRC parts: MIRC lens array and beamsplitter and spherical mirror. With all the above steps
now MIRC luminous stages are well aligned with CHARA beam, but it drifts. So ones needs to redo the aligned
a little using the method above to get most light through.

With CHARA laser on, one should see light come out of mirc vgroove. By directly looking at the bright fiber tips and
the MIRC lens array, one can roughly match them. Then check the spot size for focus, and rotate the lens array to make
sure the spots are vertical.
Then move the whole stage so that the light bounce off the spherical mirror goes through black dot on the target, doublet
and camera.

We did this on beam 3 and 4, which are the furthest two. We see beam 4 light on camera with the whole detector view, and we
don't see beam 3. The new RTschedule doesn't work with the whole detect mode, need to be fixed. We run the old MIRC system and
astropci, but FE has some problem with the whole mode, need to be fixed.

May 11th

Tried to figure out the new MIRC system problem: segmentation error when configuring the whole detector. But failed. I have a feeling
that it has something to do with the data type, because the index could exceed the limit and become some unexpected number. Such that
there is an memory leak.

1. figured out the FE problem. The code is right, it is just the row/col offsets apply to the four quadrants so that if we are using 252 X 252,
the maximum offset will be 2.

Meanwhile I spent some time on PAVO alignment and observing for the whole night.

May 12th

Find fiber position for beam 4, 5 and 6. I used old MIRC system to monitor the whole detector,
using old fiberexplorer method. Their spot sizes are similar, but not over lapped on detector.

I also tried to find beam 1 fiber position using the same method, but no success. I will try again
tomorrow.

May 13th

find fiber positions for beam 1,2,3. I used old mirc system and old fiberexplorer method. The camera configuration is
rows = 252
cols= 252
row off=2
col off =2
Nreads=5
number of frames=100
frames per reset=100
cohere coadds=10
number ps coadds=15

I also find a way to shoot laser backwards without taking off anything.
I find a mirrow in cabinet 8 from MIRC cabinet, and place it at the position where the prism is, and place the real laser
near it.

May 14th

polarization alignment!!!
1. I checked the polarization alignment on beam 1,2,3, they all look well aligned.
I put one polarizer in front of the pickoff mirror, the other in front of the camera.
I measured the intensity ratio with and without the polarizer in front of the camera.
I measured at three position: the two parallel polarizer, the one in front of the camera
rotate right, and left. Apparently, the ratio when two polarizer are parallel is maximum.

2. Then I align beam 4,5,6 to beam 1,2,3. The two polarizer are placed at the same position
as above, but this time they are parallel. I rotate the fibers to maximize the intensity ratio. I measured
at least six points for each of them. The data is in my notebook and I haven't analyzed yet. But I can already
see where the peak is.

The process is very slow because we are reading the whole detector, and noise is high. Later we
install the old MIRC cylindrical lens, and we only need to read a small range of pixels. The process is much
faster.

I also find the problem causing the new MIRC system to crash at full detector mode. It is some initialization
of xtransform and ytransform. Not sure how to fix it yet. As I comment them out, the new MIRC system runs
smoothly. In fact I used the new MIRC system to do polarization alignment.

One important thing is that background has to be taken each time I took and or put in the polarizer.

I also worked a little on 6T fiberexplorer, I made a little change, and i seems to run well.

May15th

I have analyzed the data taken yesterday, and here the data points and best fits.
The angles of beam 4,5,6 are
beam4: 195 degree;
beam5: 250 degree;
beam6: 110 degree;

[[Media:Beam4.png]]

[[Media:Beam5.png]]

[[Media:Beam6.png]]

note that in beam5, I ignored the two left points. I dont' know what happened, maybe I forgot to re-take
background after putting in or taking out the polarizer. And these angles are rough and could have 5 degrees
error. But this is OK because 5 degree means 0.4% less of coherent light.

Anyway, I confirm these best estimation of rotational angle of fibers by two methods.
One is using two orthogonal polarizers,
one in front of pickoff mirror, the other in front of camera. The light gets into the detect is very low. I can
not really estimate the percentage because of the background variation. I also rotate the fiber by a small angle (~5 degrees)
to see if the light will go away, but it doesn't, and seems to maintain the same light intensity level. Like I said, at this point
background variation dominates, so it should be good enough.

Another method to using two parallel polarizers, and putting them in the same position as above. By rotating the polarizer
in front of camera a small angle to see if the light intensity increases. Again, it doesn't really help because of background variation.

I just have an idea of doing polarization alignment of fibers if I hadn't aligned them yet. Instead of rotating the fibers each time and
using fiber explorer to find the XY position, I can rotate the polarizer in front of camera. In this way, I don't have to do fiber explorer each time,
which is time consuming. Once I find the angle that the maximize the light through put, then I know how much the fiber has to rotate.

May 16th and 17th

We got MIRC aligned, and got fringes on W1(beam3) - W2(beam4)!!!

1. Align MIRC. Beam 3 and 4 are used because they are the farthest apart.
First, we need to get CHARA laser into MIRC fibers. Then we can visually check the laser coming out the MIRC lens array. There is a faint circle around the center bright spot,
make sure the circle is even. We also check if the laser beams are horizontal by taking off the spherical mirror and looking at whether the laser beams do up or down as they
propagate. To check the focus of lens array, we put a paper at the slit where the focus of the spherical mirror should be, then by adjusting the distance between MIRC vgroove
and lens array to make the image on paper at sharp as possible. Once this is done, we steer the spherical mirror to reflect beams right to the center of the doublet.

If all the above procedure are well done, we should be able to see white light on detector once we switch it on. then by turning the actuators on spherical mirror, we can get
the beams on detector to lower left quadrant. If the beam 3 and 4 are not overlapped on detector, then there are two cases. If they are not overlapped up and down, we can rotate
the goniometer of mirc lens array. If they are not overlapped left and right, that might be due to the minor fault in the positions of fibers in vgroove, we can doing nothing about that.

Another thing is that we find beam3 and beam4 are not focused at the same time, meaning that the mirc lens array is probably tilted relative to the vgroove. so we have to tilt
vgroove (we don't have that adjustment for mirc lens array) so that the surface of len array and vgroove are parallel. So now we have all the beams well overlapped.

[[Media:beam1_aligned.png]]

[[Media:beam2_aligned.png]]

[[Media:beam3_aligned.png]]

[[Media:beam4_aligned.png]]

[[Media:beam5_aligned.png]]

[[Media:beam6_aligned.png]]

2. fringes on W1W2 with lab source. Once we got all beams aligned, we search fringes by putting a retro on beam3 and 4. The position of pickoff mirrors are

beam3: 53700

beam4: 96915

And the retro position is 4.5103 mm. Here is the fringes image.

[[Media:fringes_beam34.png]]

We find a small problem in fringes that the fringes is not balance on detector, meaning the fringes is tilted relative to detector rows. So we have to rotate the mirc
lens array and vgroove with the same angle to match the detector rows. And here are the images of fringe cross section after alignment.

[[Media:frignes_cross_section1.png]]

[[Media:frignes_cross_section2.png]]

[[Media:frignes_cross_section3.png]]

May 18th

We mount the cylindrical lens and beam3 and 4 look great. Here are the peak intensity of each row when it is focused.

beam3:
row4: 3
row5: 45
row6:3

beam4:
row4:2.5
row5: 25
row6:2.5

[[Media:beam3_cyl_lens.png]]

[[Media:beam4_cyl_lens.png]]

We find MIRC fringes on 4 more pairs of beams: b4b5, b5b6, b1b2, b2b3.

Here are the ealing position and retro position:

b4b5:
b4: 96915; b5: 30500; retro: 5.4mm

b5b6:
b5: 30500; b6: 65300; retro: 10.38mm

b1b2:
b1: 90350; b2: 78825; retro: 2.9mm

b2b3:
b2: 90325; b3: 53700; retro: 6.8mm

the fringe quality are

b3b4: ~50%
b4b5: ~25%
b5b6, b1b2, b2b3 are all above 90%.

note: two problems. 1. the intensity of b5 is about half of the rest, don't know why. 2. using 450 grism mode, we couldnt bring the beam down to the lower left quadrant because
the actuator of the doublet hits the limit. needs to move the whole mirc stage and realign tomorrow.

[[Media:beam12.png]]

[[Media:beam23.png]]

[[Media:beam56.png]]

May19th

Bad day! I aligned MIRC so that doublet has enough room to move the light in all modes to lower left quadrant, and the beams are much better focused than yesterday. B3 has 95% light in one row, and beam4 has 92% in one row. But I messed the doublet sweat spot by pushing it too far.
So I have to realign it tomorrow. So basically nothing is done today...

May20th

Realigned MIRC so that the doublet is at position where it used to be. Now if we use R~450 H band grism mode, we can bring most of rows down to the lower left quadrant, but still missing 5 rows (the total number of rows is about 70 rows.). But we have to move the doublet to the limit. Another thing that we haven't checked is the light might miss the doublet when it is moved to the limit. So the intensity will probably be low when using grism mode. Also I aligned the cylindrical lens so that more than 90% of light are focused in one row for both beam 3 and 4. One problem is that the image of slit on detector is not good, less than 50% light are focus into one row.

I also did the polarization test on fringes of beam 34, beam 45. It doesn't improve much on beam34, but improves greatly on beam45.

[[Media:beam34_nopol.png]]

[[Media:beam34_pol.png]]

[[Media:beam45_nopol_cyl.png]]

[[Media:beam45_pol_cyl.png]]

We also find fringes on beam16, first at CHARA!! but the fringes is mediam.
beam1 ealing mount: 90350
beam6 ealing mount: 60300
delay: beam6(W2) - beam1(W1) = 0.221405m

[[Media:beam16_nopol_cyl.png]]

[[Media:beam16_pol_cyl.png]]

[[Media:beam16_prism_cyl.png]]

We will probably put fiber squeezer on beam 456 so that the fringes are strong on all pairs. We have another idea of how to mount squeezer so we probably won't do this during this run.

One more thing: we always find two spots for each beam with internal light, and the bottom is the brighter one. The distance between these two spots are 20 micron or 5000 steps.

May21st

We aligned photometric channels!!. We used beam34, the peak intensity of each beam is at least twice of the mirc channel. But they haven't been optimized, I will try tomorrow.
The input angle of mirc beam into photometric channels is very sensitive, including tiptilt and beam splitter rotation.

[[Media:photometric_channels1.png]]

[[Media:photometric_channels2.png]]

I also test vignetting when using grism mode. The intensity reduces to half as prism mode and the light spread over more pixels (80% light in the central row compared to more than 90% in prism mode).

Xiao's 2011May run

2011-05-21T08:50:07Z

192.153.157.221:

May 8th

1. find the best focus for luminous 5 and 6
We mount a visible fiber to one stage and shoot visible light in from the other end.
Moving z axis manually to make sure the spot bounce off the parabola mirror maintain
similar size to a long distance, which means we find rough focus position.
Then we search XY position by letting the spot go through an alignment telescope, and look at
the spot size and shape on wall.
Then we adjust the alignment telescope to infinity by placing a mirror in front of it, and find the
two clear grid image. Now we try to adjust z axis of luminous stage manually again to find a finer
focus by looking at the spot through the telescope (BE care to reduce light first before looking in to
the telescope)

2. re-find focus position for beam 1 AND 2 AND 3
Since we replaced all the actuators on luminous stages with new ones, we have to find the focus positions
for all the stages.
For beam 1, 2 and 3, because they still use the same infrared fibers, the fiber should stay at the best focus
positions as before, which means you don't need to adjust the pickoff mirror.
We shoot laser into the MIRC vgroove and align it with CHARA beam on the alignment telescope. First place
a beamsplitter in between MIRC light and CHARA beam, and a retro near the beamsplitter:

mirror ==> alignment telescope
/\
||
MIRC light = = > beamsplitter <= = CHARA beam
|| /\
\/ ||
retro

Second, place the CHARA beam in the center of telescope by adjusting beamsplitter, retro, and mirror.
Third, overlap the CHARA beam with MIRC light by moving XYZ axis through FE gui.

Be care when looking into the telscope, reduce the laser or waring a goggles.

May 9th

1. change the fiber on luminous stage 4
shoot laser into MIRC vgroove. Moving XYZ axises to overlap with CHARA beam using the method above.
then change to new infrared fiber, and align again. Hopefully the best positions are close

2. mount luminous stages 5 and 6
shoot laser into MIRC vgroove, and move the pickoff mirror to overlap with CHARA beam.
Then change to the MIRC infrared fiber, and do this again by moving XYZ of luminous stages.

By now, we have six infrared fiber plugged in and well focused, and roughly aligned with CHARA beam.

May 10th

1. assemble new MIRC hardware pieces
Only assemble the MIRC parts: MIRC lens array and beamsplitter and spherical mirror. With all the above steps
now MIRC luminous stages are well aligned with CHARA beam, but it drifts. So ones needs to redo the aligned
a little using the method above to get most light through.

With CHARA laser on, one should see light come out of mirc vgroove. By directly looking at the bright fiber tips and
the MIRC lens array, one can roughly match them. Then check the spot size for focus, and rotate the lens array to make
sure the spots are vertical.
Then move the whole stage so that the light bounce off the spherical mirror goes through black dot on the target, doublet
and camera.

We did this on beam 3 and 4, which are the furthest two. We see beam 4 light on camera with the whole detector view, and we
don't see beam 3. The new RTschedule doesn't work with the whole detect mode, need to be fixed. We run the old MIRC system and
astropci, but FE has some problem with the whole mode, need to be fixed.

May 11th

Tried to figure out the new MIRC system problem: segmentation error when configuring the whole detector. But failed. I have a feeling
that it has something to do with the data type, because the index could exceed the limit and become some unexpected number. Such that
there is an memory leak.

1. figured out the FE problem. The code is right, it is just the row/col offsets apply to the four quadrants so that if we are using 252 X 252,
the maximum offset will be 2.

Meanwhile I spent some time on PAVO alignment and observing for the whole night.

May 12th

Find fiber position for beam 4, 5 and 6. I used old MIRC system to monitor the whole detector,
using old fiberexplorer method. Their spot sizes are similar, but not over lapped on detector.

I also tried to find beam 1 fiber position using the same method, but no success. I will try again
tomorrow.

May 13th

find fiber positions for beam 1,2,3. I used old mirc system and old fiberexplorer method. The camera configuration is
rows = 252
cols= 252
row off=2
col off =2
Nreads=5
number of frames=100
frames per reset=100
cohere coadds=10
number ps coadds=15

I also find a way to shoot laser backwards without taking off anything.
I find a mirrow in cabinet 8 from MIRC cabinet, and place it at the position where the prism is, and place the real laser
near it.

May 14th

polarization alignment!!!
1. I checked the polarization alignment on beam 1,2,3, they all look well aligned.
I put one polarizer in front of the pickoff mirror, the other in front of the camera.
I measured the intensity ratio with and without the polarizer in front of the camera.
I measured at three position: the two parallel polarizer, the one in front of the camera
rotate right, and left. Apparently, the ratio when two polarizer are parallel is maximum.

2. Then I align beam 4,5,6 to beam 1,2,3. The two polarizer are placed at the same position
as above, but this time they are parallel. I rotate the fibers to maximize the intensity ratio. I measured
at least six points for each of them. The data is in my notebook and I haven't analyzed yet. But I can already
see where the peak is.

The process is very slow because we are reading the whole detector, and noise is high. Later we
install the old MIRC cylindrical lens, and we only need to read a small range of pixels. The process is much
faster.

I also find the problem causing the new MIRC system to crash at full detector mode. It is some initialization
of xtransform and ytransform. Not sure how to fix it yet. As I comment them out, the new MIRC system runs
smoothly. In fact I used the new MIRC system to do polarization alignment.

One important thing is that background has to be taken each time I took and or put in the polarizer.

I also worked a little on 6T fiberexplorer, I made a little change, and i seems to run well.

May15th

I have analyzed the data taken yesterday, and here the data points and best fits.
The angles of beam 4,5,6 are
beam4: 195 degree;
beam5: 250 degree;
beam6: 110 degree;

[[Media:Beam4.png]]

[[Media:Beam5.png]]

[[Media:Beam6.png]]

note that in beam5, I ignored the two left points. I dont' know what happened, maybe I forgot to re-take
background after putting in or taking out the polarizer. And these angles are rough and could have 5 degrees
error. But this is OK because 5 degree means 0.4% less of coherent light.

Anyway, I confirm these best estimation of rotational angle of fibers by two methods.
One is using two orthogonal polarizers,
one in front of pickoff mirror, the other in front of camera. The light gets into the detect is very low. I can
not really estimate the percentage because of the background variation. I also rotate the fiber by a small angle (~5 degrees)
to see if the light will go away, but it doesn't, and seems to maintain the same light intensity level. Like I said, at this point
background variation dominates, so it should be good enough.

Another method to using two parallel polarizers, and putting them in the same position as above. By rotating the polarizer
in front of camera a small angle to see if the light intensity increases. Again, it doesn't really help because of background variation.

I just have an idea of doing polarization alignment of fibers if I hadn't aligned them yet. Instead of rotating the fibers each time and
using fiber explorer to find the XY position, I can rotate the polarizer in front of camera. In this way, I don't have to do fiber explorer each time,
which is time consuming. Once I find the angle that the maximize the light through put, then I know how much the fiber has to rotate.

May 16th and 17th

We got MIRC aligned, and got fringes on W1(beam3) - W2(beam4)!!!

1. Align MIRC. Beam 3 and 4 are used because they are the farthest apart.
First, we need to get CHARA laser into MIRC fibers. Then we can visually check the laser coming out the MIRC lens array. There is a faint circle around the center bright spot,
make sure the circle is even. We also check if the laser beams are horizontal by taking off the spherical mirror and looking at whether the laser beams do up or down as they
propagate. To check the focus of lens array, we put a paper at the slit where the focus of the spherical mirror should be, then by adjusting the distance between MIRC vgroove
and lens array to make the image on paper at sharp as possible. Once this is done, we steer the spherical mirror to reflect beams right to the center of the doublet.

If all the above procedure are well done, we should be able to see white light on detector once we switch it on. then by turning the actuators on spherical mirror, we can get
the beams on detector to lower left quadrant. If the beam 3 and 4 are not overlapped on detector, then there are two cases. If they are not overlapped up and down, we can rotate
the goniometer of mirc lens array. If they are not overlapped left and right, that might be due to the minor fault in the positions of fibers in vgroove, we can doing nothing about that.

Another thing is that we find beam3 and beam4 are not focused at the same time, meaning that the mirc lens array is probably tilted relative to the vgroove. so we have to tilt
vgroove (we don't have that adjustment for mirc lens array) so that the surface of len array and vgroove are parallel. So now we have all the beams well overlapped.

[[Media:beam1_aligned.png]]

[[Media:beam2_aligned.png]]

[[Media:beam3_aligned.png]]

[[Media:beam4_aligned.png]]

[[Media:beam5_aligned.png]]

[[Media:beam6_aligned.png]]

2. fringes on W1W2 with lab source. Once we got all beams aligned, we search fringes by putting a retro on beam3 and 4. The position of pickoff mirrors are

beam3: 53700

beam4: 96915

And the retro position is 4.5103 mm. Here is the fringes image.

[[Media:fringes_beam34.png]]

We find a small problem in fringes that the fringes is not balance on detector, meaning the fringes is tilted relative to detector rows. So we have to rotate the mirc
lens array and vgroove with the same angle to match the detector rows. And here are the images of fringe cross section after alignment.

[[Media:frignes_cross_section1.png]]

[[Media:frignes_cross_section2.png]]

[[Media:frignes_cross_section3.png]]

May 18th

We mount the cylindrical lens and beam3 and 4 look great. Here are the peak intensity of each row when it is focused.

beam3:
row4: 3
row5: 45
row6:3

beam4:
row4:2.5
row5: 25
row6:2.5

[[Media:beam3_cyl_lens.png]]

[[Media:beam4_cyl_lens.png]]

We find MIRC fringes on 4 more pairs of beams: b4b5, b5b6, b1b2, b2b3.

Here are the ealing position and retro position:

b4b5:
b4: 96915; b5: 30500; retro: 5.4mm

b5b6:
b5: 30500; b6: 65300; retro: 10.38mm

b1b2:
b1: 90350; b2: 78825; retro: 2.9mm

b2b3:
b2: 90325; b3: 53700; retro: 6.8mm

the fringe quality are

b3b4: ~50%
b4b5: ~25%
b5b6, b1b2, b2b3 are all above 90%.

note: two problems. 1. the intensity of b5 is about half of the rest, don't know why. 2. using 450 grism mode, we couldnt bring the beam down to the lower left quadrant because
the actuator of the doublet hits the limit. needs to move the whole mirc stage and realign tomorrow.

[[Media:beam12.png]]

[[Media:beam23.png]]

[[Media:beam56.png]]

May19th

Bad day! I aligned MIRC so that doublet has enough room to move the light in all modes to lower left quadrant, and the beams are much better focused than yesterday. B3 has 95% light in one row, and beam4 has 92% in one row. But I messed the doublet sweat spot by pushing it too far.
So I have to realign it tomorrow. So basically nothing is done today...

May20th

Realigned MIRC so that the doublet is at position where it used to be. Now if we use R~450 H band grism mode, we can bring most of rows down to the lower left quadrant, but still missing 5 rows (the total number of rows is about 70 rows.). But we have to move the doublet to the limit. Another thing that we haven't checked is the light might miss the doublet when it is moved to the limit. So the intensity will probably be low when using grism mode. Also I aligned the cylindrical lens so that more than 90% of light are focused in one row for both beam 3 and 4. One problem is that the image of slit on detector is not good, less than 50% light are focus into one row.

I also did the polarization test on fringes of beam 34, beam 45. It doesn't improve much on beam34, but improves greatly on beam45.

[[Media:beam34_nopol.png]]

[[Media:beam34_pol.png]]

[[Media:beam45_nopol_cyl.png]]

[[Media:beam45_pol_cyl.png]]

We also find fringes on beam16, first at CHARA!! but the fringes is mediam.
beam1 ealing mount: 90350
beam6 ealing mount: 60300
delay: beam6(W2) - beam1(W1) = 0.221405m

[[Media:beam16_nopol_cyl.png]]

[[Media:beam_pol_cyl.png]]

[[Media:beam16_prism_cyl.png]]

We will probably put fiber squeezer on beam 456 so that the fringes are strong on all pairs. We have another idea of how to mount squeezer so we probably won't do this during this run.

One more thing: we always find two spots for each beam with internal light, and the bottom is the brighter one. The distance between these two spots are 20 micron or 5000 steps.

2011-05-09T22:30:50Z

192.153.157.221: New page: May 8th best focus for luminous 5 and6 re-find focus position for beam 1 AND 2 AND 3 May 9th

May 8th

best focus for luminous 5 and6

re-find focus position for beam 1 AND 2 AND 3

May 9th

MIRC 6T upgrade

2011-05-09T22:24:50Z

192.153.157.221:

[[schedule]]

[[storage]]

[[shopping list]]

[[things need to be replaced]]

[[things need to be taken back]]

[[Xiao's 2011April run]]

[[Xiao's 2011May run]]

Xiao's 2011April run

2011-04-25T17:08:17Z

192.153.157.221: New page: April 19th - 25th 1. test and mount the new actuators for luminous stages test procedure: a. connect all 18 actuators in serial, three power line input. b. manually turn the knob to m...

April 19th - 25th

1. test and mount the new actuators for luminous stages
test procedure:
a. connect all 18 actuators in serial, three power line input.
b. manually turn the knob to move each actuators at random position
c. open the fiberexplorer gui, and home all the actuators, the yellow light
turned on and off automatically, and the positions of all the actuators
return to zero on the gui.
d. repeat b and c several times, they work well each time.

2. field test of new MIRC hardware pieces.
PCs pieces are not in the right position, need to be moved forward, left and downwards. (see my notebook)
MIRC pieces need to move down a few mm (3 mm?)

3. New MIRC control system.
a. upgrade devel account to sudoer list, copies files from /root/MIRC
b. run % sudo RTscheduler 60000
% spooler
These two procedures are actually under /usr/local/bin/ as we found out later, not the ones
inside the folder.
c. open IRCam gui, and follow the normal observation procedure: update DAQ parameters, config camera, ...
d. open fiberexplorer gui, and following the normal observation procedure: load camera conf, fiber mapping...
All the above steps are working well, I didn't spot any error.

Then I start to save some data, and find two errors.
1. Frame counterror: receive only XXX out of 1500 frames.
2. 4Header read error

For the first error, I think we have seen that before. But it is happening more frequently, I saved 64 files, and it happened
5 times.
For the second error, I have never seen that before, is this the header problem you mentioned before? IT happened twice
during saving 64 files.

I looked into the saved files. Because we are not on a real target, I am not sure if the header is right. But it looks normal, nothing wired.

MIRC 6T upgrade

2011-04-25T17:07:03Z

192.153.157.221:

2010-10-09T04:20:00Z

192.153.157.221:

See last set of notes from
[[Engineering 2010July-Aug]]

-----

===Daily Log:===

==2010 October 2:==

fb: realigned champ optics and started working on fringe-jumping and coherent integration for cophasing.

==2010 October 3:==
fb: did a first alignment using the IR array but mostly worked on improving the software.

==2010 October 4:==
fb and sk

morning -- checking the alignment, CHAMP fully aligned at noon

afternoon -- trying to debug the Zaber mount repeatability problem

==2010 October 5:==
fb and sk

morning -- redo alignment on E1S1; problems finding pyramid center (it helps to turn on the incandescent lights); fix problems with Zaber mount motors by increasing sleeptime from 3s to 10s

afternoon -- small updates to champGui; searching for beams on wide-field image; 3-4 beams found but problems to align them

evening -- redo alignment on W1W2; found internal WL fringes on R2 using W1-W2 (Beam 1-2) at +3.95mm (see image)

[[Image:CHAMP.Fringe-W1W2-B1B2-R2.2010-10-05.jpg|800px]]

==2010 October 6:==
fb, sk, and rmg

morning -- discuss with rafael alignment procedure

afternoon -- readjusting pyramid position to avoid bad pixels in the Q1 quadrant; new pyramid center at x=23, y=8; use for IRCam following offsets: row=5, col=20

evening -- discussing alignment tool; add functionality to Pixel_Pico.py to adjust the sign of the motion (done, but still have to determine the values)

==2010 October 7:==
fb, sk, and rmg

Config: S1 E1 W1 W2 then later S2 E1 W1 W2

The first goal of the night was mainly to adjust the internal delays between MIRC and CHAMP, taking care of limiting vignetting within MIRC. The "good" positions of MIRC ealing mounts were defined as the ones adopted during the last MIRC/PAVO run, where MIRC and PAVO were cophased. For each baseline the Newport RETRO cube will be moved to find fringes on MIRC, and the CHAMP Zaber mounts moved until we get fringes on CHAMP. This method is not failproof as we need enough range on CHAMP Zaber mounts to cophase MIRC and CHAMP.
As the RETRO cubes were initially on W1W2, we started by B3-B4, then tried B2-B3 and B1-B2.

Initial tries:

Fringe found on CHAMP for B3-B4

CHAMP-IR4: 196500

MIRC-IR3=66000 (good position),

MIRC-IR4=71615 (moved 2mm from the good position 51615 as there was not enough range on CHAMP-IR4 to find fringe)

Fringe found on CHAMP for B2-B3

CHAMP-IR3: 182150

MIRC-IR2: 80449 ("good")

MIRC-IR3: 66000 ("good")

Could not find the fringe on CHAMP for B1-B2

MIRC-IR2: 80449

MIRC-IR1: 40350 (moved +/-2mm from good position)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LT 00:28 (37 And), found B3-B4 fringes on CHAMP.

Note: over time CHAMP-IR3 position moved from 179850 to 180250 (but initially found at 182150).

LT 03:18 found B2-B3 fringes on CHAMP but position moves rapidly from 182350

LT 03:30 MIRC sees all fringes, but CHAMP cannot find them using the previously determined offsets. We try to search around but quickly realize that the FT buttons on OPLE were green (FT inactive) so OPLE was not receiving offsets. This is probably due to an early reboot of OPLE during the night.

LT 04:30 found B2-B3 fringes with CHAMP-IR3: 182300, no B3-B4 fringe.
We went to the lab to check again that CHAMP-IR1/IR2/IR3/IR4 Zaber mounts were moving reliably. Made various tests, Zaber mounts reproduce reliably.

LT 04:45 found B3-B4 fringes with CHAMP-IR3: 182300, CHAMP-IR4: 208350, MIRC-IR4: 71615. Attempted to record cophased data with fringes "LOCK" (ftdata_400153) and "OFF" (ftdata_401959), however MIRC was locking, not CHAMP.
Despite now having the FT toggles set up ok on OPLE, it does not appear than we can paddle the fringes away (tried 1-300 microns in range) ? (not sure)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Identified bugs:

champGui: scaling of Amp-vs-OPD plot in bottom panel sometimes strange

champGui: delay line offsets do not update

astropci: negative values in Amp-vs-OPD

champGui/astropci: properly identify the panels with certain beam/telescope combinations

==2010 October 8:==
fb, sk, and rmg

Config: S1 E1 W1 W2 (B1-B2-B3-B4)

LT 15:00 doing alignment

LT 17:00 setting up MIRC in order to co-phase MIRC and CHAMP. For this, we start with the MIRC-IR-offsets from last night and then get fringes with MIRC by moving the RETROs. Then, we adjust the CHAMP-IR-Zaber mounts in order to find fringes with CHAMP.

LT 18:30 searching for fringes at B3-B4 using MIRC-IR3=66000, MIRC-IR4= 71615 (were we found it yesterday), cannot find fringes with CHAMP

LT 19:00 searching for fringes at B3-B4 using MIRC-IR3=66000, MIRC-IR4=80000, cannot find fringes with CHAMP

LT 19:30 searching for fringes at B2-B3 using MIRC-IR2=80449, MIRC-IR3=66000, found fringes at CHAMP-IR2: 175000 ("good"), CHAMP-IR3: 182100; after finding the fringes we homes CHAMP-IR2 and CHAMP-IR3 and they could recover the position very accurately (hitting precisely the center of the fringe); so these Zaber mounts seem to be OK

Engineering 2010Oct

2010-10-09T00:22:41Z

192.153.157.221: