COMMON MISTAKES

Here are some common mistakes to watch out for. Many of these have been already been perpetrated by various astronomers (some of whom really ought to know better) and that includes the people who wrote this section!

• Make sure the robot is parked before taking exposures.
• Make sure the sky PA and equinox are correct when acquiring a new field (it's a good idea to have the printout of the .cfg file and plot of the field handy).
• Remember to take arcs, offset skys (as well as the program frame) for each configuration.
• If you are using a filter with the arcs, but not with the program exposures, remember to take the filter out for the program field.
• Check that the ADC is working.
• Make sure that the Support Astronomer or Duty Techs have run af2_loadmodule at the beginning of a run, i.e. when the fibre module has just been put on.
• If a field set-up fails during configuration, contact your Support Astronomer or the Duty Tech immediately. Do not enter any ICL commands, to either WYFFOS or AF2.
• When a grating or filter is changed, remember to run the wchange routine in ICL, and make the changes as directed.
• Check the focus - occasionally it will set itself to the wrong value, particularly if you have been fiddling about in WYFFOS (e.g. changing filters) - it should be zero for no filters in the beam.
• Make sure back-illumination, arcs and inspection lights are off before turning up TV gain (it warns you about back-illumination, but not about the others!)
• Wait for the CCD to finish reading out before doing a new afsetup. Do not start a afsetup until the telescope has stopped moving.

Good luck observing with WYFFOS/AUTOFIB!