[evlatests] Strange goings-on for AW703

[Ken Sowinski]

This was the afternoon that miranda broke and networking at the
VLA was, at best, slow for a long time.  The oeprator interpreted
this as a vis-pipe failure and tried to treat it at as such
without much success.  Not much useful was happening much of the
time; logs may give some clue as to when the problem began and
stopped.  If not James may have a memory of when things happened.

This program probably needs to be reobserved and someone should
take advantage of the opportunity to fix all the observe file
problems Mark noted.  In addition to what he reports I saw many
examples of warnings in the executor log that the antennas were
pointing within a fraction of a degree of the sun.  The quality
of the data suggests that not much damage will accrue to having
marked as 'public'.

Ken


On Wed, 1 Aug 2007, Mark Claussen wrote:

> I took a look  at AW703, observed on July 29, 2007 as part of
> checking on modcomp-free science observations, and found, that,
> unlike most of the data sets I have looked at, this project had
> some pretty strange goings-on.  I post this to evlatests in order
> that others might comment or try to figure out what happened.
>
> This project was standard X-band continuum.  The start IAT was 19:12.
> There were a couple of user errors that made this project iffy to
> begin with: 1) the source names had embedded blanks, and most targets
> were 3C or 4C sources so the names were like "4C 51.2".  Thus AIPS
> interpreted all these sources as the same object with different
> qualifiers.  Will be pretty tricky to sort out; 2) the project
> code was ADA000 rather than AW703, so the data showed up in the
> archive under ADA000, and marked *public*.
>
> The only log info about this project rather than the usual messages
> were that 1) Antenna 18 was stowed because of a foc/rot problem and
> that 2) for about 1/2 hour (2035 - 2104) VISPIPE gave no data.
>
> The curiosities with this data were:
>
> 1) For most scans, there is some period of time at the beginning
> (can last up to minutes) where there are no fringes for any combination,
> then at some point the fringes pop up and are there for the rest of the
> scan, as if the antennas are off source or something.  But the data is
> not flagged by the online system.   A specific example of this is:
>
>     There is a 10 minute scan on 1411+215 in the middle of the
>     run (215620 - 220600, scan listing).  For all antennas, there
>     are no fringes on this source until 220430.  Nothing in the
>     log, and the data is not flagged.  After 220430, fringes on all
>     baselines look good.
>
> 2) There is data coming from Antenna 18.  No fringes, as would be 
expected
> since the antenna was apparently stowed, but the data wasn't flagged.
>
> 3) Antenna 11 had data on EVLA baselines.  There were no fringes, and data
> 11-VLA baselines must have been flagged.
>
> 4) For at least one scan and possibly others, there were data only for
> EVLA-EVLA baselines.
>
>
>
> It seems like something was fairly messed up for this run, as opposed to
> other data sets that I have looked at recently, where the data looks very
> good.
>
> Mark
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