This is Week 7 of LSSTCam on-sky commissioning. The LSSTCam on-sky campaign has now surpassed the duration of the ComCam on-sky campaign. As the team gains experience, more of the day-to-day summit operations are being automated and/or transitioned to routine procedures. While commissioning is still ongoing, with additional tools, training, and documentation now in place, a larger fraction of the team is transitioning to remote on-call support during nighttime operations. More than 28K total exposures have been acquired since the first LSSTCam on-sky images on 15 April, including more than 17K on-sky exposures.
The activities reported last week continued through this week. Some new highlights this week included the following:
- In calibration, the collimated beam projector (CBP) was used to perform a wavelength sweep of the u band. Single LED flats with rotations and photon transfer curve (PTC) data were taken.
- The team began testing the active optics system (AOS) in a wide-area survey mode with the Feature Based Scheduler (FBS) driving a distribution of telescope pointings and slews that are representative of the LSST Wide-Fast-Deep survey. This exercise is a precursor for starting pilot observations for the Science Validation surveys.
- Data management started reprocessing more than 3000 visits taken during the first weeks of the on-sky testing campaign. The visits were spread over six target regions, each with coverage in at least three bands. Collectively, the fields provide coverage in all six bands. Deep coadd images have been produced for regions spanning a broad range of stellar densities.
- The y-band filter replaced the u-band filter in the carousel. The next full moon is on 11 June.
- With this week’s on-sky testing with the y filter, AOS has now demonstrated closed loop convergence in all six bands.
- Densely dithered star field observations continued this week in the izy bands, now providing full ugrizy band coverage in the region to test the internal photometric calibration.