[Yaakov, Jenne]

The short version:

Rana and Koji pointed out to us that the MCR camera view was still not good.  There were 2 problems:

(1) Diagonal stripes through the beam spot.  Yuta and I saw this a week or 2 before he left, but we were bad and didn't elog it, and didn't investigate.  Bad grad students.

(2) Clipping of the left side of the beam (as seen on the monitors).  This wasn't noticed until Yaakov's earlier camera work, since the clipped part of the beam wasn't on the monitor.

The fix for #1 was to partially close the iris which is the first "optic" the beam sees on the AP table after leaving the vacuum. 

The "fix" for #2 was that the wrong beam has been going to the camera for an unknown length of time.  We picked the correct beam, and all is well again.

We moved the 10% BS that splits the main beam into the (MC REFL PD) path and the (MCR camera + WFS) path.  It looked like the transmission through there was close to the edge of the BS.  We didn't think that this was causing the clipping that we saw on the camera (since when we stepped MC1 in Yaw, the beam spot had to move a lot before we saw any clipping), but it seemed like a good idea to make the beam not near the edge of the optic, especially since, being a 2" optic, there was plenty of room, and we were only using ~half of the optic.  We didn't touch anything else in the WFS path, since that looks at the transmission through this BS, but we had to realign the beam onto MC REFL.

The long version:

(1)  The fix for #1 was to partially close the iris which is the first "optic" the beam sees on the AP table after leaving the vacuum.  It looks like that's why the iris was there in the first place.  When we found it this evening, the iris was totally open, so my current theory is that someone was on the AP table doing something, and accidentally bumped the handle for the iris, then left it completely open when they realized that they had touched it.  I think Steve had been doing something on the AP table around then, but since Yuta and I didn't elog our observation (bad grad students!), I can't correlate it with any of Steve's elogs. We were not able to find exactly where this "glow" that the iris is used to obscure comes from, but we traced it as far as the viewport, so there's something going on inside.

(2)  The "fix" for #2 was that the wrong beam has been going to the camera for an unknown length of time.  We picked the correct beam, and all is well again. 

We spent a long time trying to figure out what was going on here.  Eventually, we moved the camera around to different places (i.e. right before the MC REFL PD, with some ND filters, and then we used a window to pick off a piece of the beam right as it comes out of the vacuum before going through the iris, put some ND filters, then the camera).  We thought that right before the MC REFL PD was also being clipped, indicating that the clipping was happening in the vacuum (since the only common things between the MC REFL PD path and the camera path are the iris, which we had removed completely, and a 2" 10% beam splitter.  However, when we looked at a pickoff of the main beam before any beamsplitters, we didn't see any evidence of clipping.  I think that when we had the camera by MC REFL, we could have been clipping on the ND filters that I had placed there.  I didn't think to check that at the time, and it was kind of a pain to mush the camera into the space, so we didn't repeat that.  Then we went back to the nominal MCR camera place to look around.  We discovered that the Y1 which splits the camera path from the WFS path has a ghost beam which is clipping on the top right side (as you look at the face of the optic) of the optic, and this is the beam that was going to the camera (it's a Y1 since we only want a teensy bit of light to go to the camera, the rest goes to the WFS).  There is another beam which is the main beam, going through the center of the optic, which is the one which also reflects and heads to the WFS.  This is the beam which we should have on the camera.  Yaakov put the camera back in it's usual place, and put the correct beam onto the center of the camera.  We did a check to make sure that the main beam isn't clipping, and when I step MC1 yaw, the beam must move ~1.5mm before we start to see any clipping on the very edge of the beam.  To see / measure this, we removed the optic which directs the beam to the camera, and taped an IR card to the inside of the black box.  This is ~about the same distance as to the nominal camera position, which means that the beam would have to move by 1.5mm on the camera to see any clipping.  The MC REFL PD is even farther from MC1 than our IR card, so the beam has to fall off the PD before we see the clipping.  Thus, I'm not worried about any clipping for this main beam.  Moral of the story, if you made it this far:  There wasn't any clipping on any beams going to either the WFS or the MC REFL PD, only the beam going to the camera.