Some of the automated data gathering routines and systems have failed in the times since the last time change from daylight savings to standard time.
Let me tell you how much of a pain in the ass that is.
The entire daylight savings time system is moving on inertia. Not since World War 2 has it been needed, nor does it provide any benefits to society anymore.
So back to particulars.
The allsky1 cameras system should be back up and running automatically. Some of the automated routines were a little out of sync.
I am looking at changing these series of jobs from a static start time to something more dynamic with semaphores from one process to the next.
The biggest issue is still the automatic start of CCDsoft… ever since the time change it is not starting automatically, but needs to be manually started. That is a big pain, every evening, mostly to remember to do it, tweak the code a bit in the hopes that it is now fixed.
The Sudden Ionospheric Detector 1 (SID1) got stuck a few days back but has been reset for data recording starting daily at 00:00 UT (or 19:00 EST).
One of its problems is a creeping data collection start time. Setting it to take a data reading every 240 seconds gives us a full one day chart in the end.
That is every 4 minutes, 15 times/hour, or 360 times/day. The problem is there is a discrete time interval to stop and start the data collection and the time tends to creep later and later into the day. Ie by day 30 of the data run it may be starting 5 sec*30=150 seconds later than it should.. or 3 minutes.
We tried setting it to 239 seconds instead of 240 but that leads to a 360 second deficit each and every day, or 6 minutes, far more than the other direction.
So it will be reset back to 240 seconds between data points.
The Sudden Ionospheric Detector 2 (SID2) still is not responding correctly to what we think it should be. The data automation routines have also broken and will need repair.
The FMMeteor detector has been down for a few months, mainly because the CPU of the box running Windows NT2000 could not handle the extra job of running SID2, so we shut down the Meteor detector temproraily.