RHESSI tohban report, August 5, 2002 Hugh Hudson, Paula Balciunaite, Steven Christe Spacecraft: Routine operation with no notable anomalies. Solar activity: High early in the week, culminating in a very impulsive X-class flare at 19:11 August 3, plus an M6.6 on the next day. Both were near the limb, and RHESSI in the clear for the X1 except entering the northern decimation zone towards the end. Ground station: nominal operation Attenuator operation: A013 -> A13 209/18:50 A13 -> A013 212/00:01 A013 -> A13 212/15:44 A13 -> A013 214/00:13 A013 -> A13 214/19:13 A13 -> A013 215/00:20 A013 -> A13 216/14:22 The higher activity made it impossible to run with shutter A013; in particular the M6.6 was an LDE and we are still recovering from that increment. Tohban organization: The tohban trainee program is off to a flying start. The two trainees, Steve and Paula, now almost everything now and are writing a Web-based manual for tohban instruction. We hope to have it complete by the time Brian Dennis takes over. There is now a tohban account on the Suns (question - should it be a "rhessi" account? If it is the e-mail source for observing coordination, that might be easier for people). Charter members of the tohban account, who can do rsh into it without a password, are balciunaite (brian dennis) - needs to be in Berkeley for this dsmith fletcher ghurford hhudson jimm jloran krucker schriste sharadk Observing campaigns: We have been supporting the VLA observations of Benz and Bastian. This required sending RHESSI ephemeris info to them ahead of time so that they could arrange their calibrations during RHESSI's eclipse periods. There is software for that now, called /home/tohban/idl/hsi_predeph.pro. There is another VLA run on August 9 and another few hours on August 29. Memory management: We had to excise data from the SSR in order to make room for shutter-out observations during the August 2 VLA session, and we did that clumsily. We moved the write pointer so as to eliminate data from 12:00 and 214 00:12. David Smith pointed out that this is not as good as moving the _read_ pointer, which leaves data intact until the buffer gets around to those locations again. In this case there was almost a very interesting gamma-ray burst lost by adjusting the write pointer, so we should have the working rule always to use the read-pointer adjustment if necessary. There is now a link to the HETE real-time catalog on the "tohban links" page - see now http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~tohban for that sort of thing. We also excised data prior to the August 3 VLA session, but this time by moving the read pointer. I forgot to record the times but then again we don't have any official place to record them. We should probably keep a log so that we'll know what caused these certain gaps. Initially we'll try just to keep a .txt file on the tohban directory /logs. Mantle of tohbanship: The tohbans for next week will be Paula and Steve, putting their new manual to good use we must hope.