MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observer's Report for 2003 Feb 09

Observer(s): Vestergaard and Bentz
Institution(s): OSU

Instrument: Templeton

Worked for 13 hours (all night)
Conditions were Non-Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1.6 arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing 2 arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing ~2 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

The telescope seems to be having troubles keeping track of where
it is and where it has been sent.  We've had problems finding our
objects and so we think that the telescope has pointing errors?
We also found that when the RA and Dec encoders were reset, the 
computer did not always update the RA and Dec to the values that 
we entered (ex: RA of 3 hours entered, RA of 5 hours recorded; 
later Dec of -20 min entered, Dec of 0 0 0 recorded).  This could 
explain the troubles we had last night as well (such as suddenly 
discovering after several hours of observing that we couldn't 
find our objects when moving to a new field, and also taking a very
long time to find the right pointing at the beginning of the 
night).  We had cirrus coming and going all night, and the 
seeing was variable.

------------------------------

Submitted on 2003 Feb 10 [7:13:01]