MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observer's Report for 2007 May 10

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

Instrument: CCDS

Worked for 9 hours (all night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1.8 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   Mid: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   End: Seeing 1.8 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable

Observing Summary:

In the afternoon after the day crew left, I had problems trying
to start our nightly calibrations.  Specifically, MIS was 
returning errors whenever it was issued a command to turn on 
the flat field lamp, whether this was issued on the command line 
(in our script) or clicking the button on the GUI for the lamp.  
An image that should have been a flat field was dark, so the lamp
was clearly not turning on. I restarted the software several times
and completely rebooted all the data-taking computers, but this 
did not solve the problem.  I called Steven and his best guess
was that the flat field lamp had burned out.  The other lamps
were working as they usually do, so I skipped the internal flats
for the evening.

At the suggestion of Rick Pogge, I took some sky flats to 
practice exposure times, with the intent of taking a full set 
of good sky flats tomorrow night to check the illumination 
correction that was derived at the beginning of the campaign.

In addition, the guider is still not able to be focused using
the paddle in the observing room.  Tony showed me where the 
mechanism is located on the telescope and how to move it by 
hand.  I spent some time on this at the beginning of the night,
as it was difficult to locate a suitable star because the focus
was so bad, and adjusted it halfway through the night when the 
focus seemed to be souring a bit.  This caused me to be a bit 
behind the typical schedule.  The guide camera also seems to 
have acquired a light leak, probably due to the metal tape not
sticking and completely covering the entrance to the guider 
focus mechanism that I was working with at different times.
Specifically, there is a very bright arc of light on the right-
hand side of the guide monitor that flickers when the guider
is moving and is lessened in intensity if the guider is at a 
specific location.

I was able to acquire 3 spectra for each of the targets except
Mrk290 (which has two spectra) and 2 spectra each for 2 
standards.  I was not able to fit a 4th  spectrum in for MCG08 
due to the loss of time with the guider. As it was, the final 
spectrum for Mrk290 was taken well into twilight and the guide
star counts had dropped to only 3000 by the end of the exposure.

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Submitted on 2007 May 11 [5:07:07]