Reports until 13:43, Thursday 06 July 2017
H1 General
jim.warner@LIGO.ORG - posted 13:43, Thursday 06 July 2017 (37355)
Mid-Shift Summary

Still recovering from the earthquake, currently waiting for Jeff to damp down bounce modes in ALS diff. Corey had started, but there was no light visible on a lot of cameras (notably ALSX/Y had no spots), the AS spot looked bad.

What we've done so far:

1. Use the drift mon page looking back to the last lock to get most of the suspensions close. Corey had done some IMC alignment and the modecleaner was locked, so the MCs and IMs are not in exactly the same spots, but MC2 trans and IM4 trans were close.

2. ETM oplevs were way off, and the green WFS had no light on them, so we used the oplevs as a new reference and moved the ETMs until the green WFS were happy. ALS spots were still not visible.

3. We tried using the ditherAlign.py script, but it seemed to have only worked for TMSX & the script changes the TEST offsets (used for misaligning the quads) which caused problems for us later. Kiwamu & Keita think the TMSY alignment was too bad for even the ditheralign script to work. At the end of the dither of TMSY, we saw a spot move across the ITMY camera, so Kiwamu used that camera to find the ALSY spot and move TMSY to a rough alignment.

4. At about the same time as 3. we moved PR3 to recover the ALSX spot on the camera. 

5. Similarly, we moved SR3 to recover that AS camera spot position.

6. Hand alignment of ALSX and ALSY (the usual ETM/ITM/TMS tweaking to get ALS TRX/Y power up to some level high enough to engage the loops). Then finish usual ALS initial alignment.

7. During input align, we restored PRM and SRM to their alignment from the previous lock. We then noticed fringey bad crap on the AS camera. This is when we realized/remembered that the ditheralign script changes the TEST OFFSETS on the ITMs. This needs to be changed because it made input alignment impossible, because ITMY was getting misaligned enough with the new offsets. We also had to temporarily increase the LSC Xarm loop gain. I think Kiwamu said by a factor of 2.

8. During PRM align we restored PR2 alignment from the previous lock.

9. Getting Mich dark locked required taking the ALIGN_IFO guardian down and doing a rough alignment of the BS, making the AS spot and smooth and round as possible before requesting Mich dark.

10. SRC align required a large realignment of SRM. The ASC wouldn't engage until the SRM was close enough, but we didn't have to do anything special. Request SRC align and pushed SRM around until the ASC grabbed it. It was difficult to see any improvements on the AS camera and SRM has to move a lot.

11. When we got back to locking, ALSY was being difficult and the camera loops was pulling the arm out of alignment. Jeff cleared the history with the script on the ALS overview, that seemed to fix it. 

12. Jeff expected bounce modes to be high, so we spent ~1.5 hrs sitting on ALS diff while he gingerly damped them down.

After that, we had problems moving past ALS diff, so we re-did initial alignment. We're now at DRMI, moving to RF_DARM to see what other beasts are waiting for us.