MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observer's Report for 2007 Sep 11

Observer(s): Eastman
Institution(s): OSU

Instrument: 4K

Worked for 8 hours (most of the night)
Conditions were Non-Photometric most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds from 7:00 until 9:00.
   Beg: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing 3.5 arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing 2 arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

After the first couple hours of bad weather, the night turned out to be pretty good. I observed TrES-3, a transiting planet for the first half. With the help of a $40 space heater (that turned 1.5  seeing into 3  seeing), I could expose longer and readout less, effectively tripling the number of photons I could collect. I also observed it for much longer than I thought possible, down to 8.86 airmasses! (which tripped the horizon limit again, but now I could more quickly recover from that). It'll be interesting to see how useful the photometry is through almost 9 airmasses....

After that, I observed an eclipsing binary in M33 for Jose, which made for a nice pretty picture too.

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Submitted on 2007 Sep 12 [6:09:52]