HET downtime

[Steven Janowiecki]

Dear HET users,

I wanted to let you know that HET will be offline starting this morning and lasting hopefully only a night or two as the engineering staff work to fix a critical hardware issue that arose recently. Briefly, the filter stage on the Acquisition Camera has failed and it cannot be accessed in place so they will be bringing part of the top end down to the ground for these repairs.

After the work is finished we will verify the on-sky pointing/alignment and resume science operations as quickly as possible. Once all of that is complete I'll send out another message to let you all know.

Steven

[Steven Janowiecki]

Dear HET users,

I'm happy to let you know that the engineering staff finished the hardware repairs and reassembled the telescope on Friday. On Friday night we re-commissioned and measured/verified alignment on sky -- I say "we" but it was really Justen Pautzke and Amy Ray successfully leading this effort on their own!

We had significant cloud cover during the night last night so there are a few outstanding measurements and datasets to collect tonight, but the HET has resumed regular science operations (including one HPF science target through thin clouds last night).

As usual the alignment shifts on-sky were fairly small, but were measure-able and we are compensating for them in our setup procedures. If you find anything unusual or concerning in your data, please raise those to us as soon as possible and we'll be happy to help figure out what's happening.

Thanks for your patience with this unexpected downtime,

Steven