MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observer's Report for 2008 Apr 30

Observer(s): Atlee
Institution(s): OSU

Instrument: 4k Camera

Worked for 9 hours (all night)
Conditions were Non-Photometric most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1.7 arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Moderate
   Mid: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate
   End: Seeing 1.7 arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Moderate

Observing Summary:

Over the course of the night, I collected data from a number of
M dwarf binaries for Katie Schlessinger and took two extended
runs of CVn for Joe Patterson.

Overall things went very well, but with two notable exceptions.
Strong wind gusts from the south caused vibrations in the
telescope, effectively limiting the selection of targets to 
those objects north of the observatory.  This did not prevent
me from finding enough targets to fill the night.  The only
significant difficulty to arise from this was in taking standard
fields for Katie, as all available standard fields are located
to the south.  This caused moderately poor images for
some standard exposures.

Second, the telescope seemed to have difficulty holding focus
after the first half of the night.  I would focus the telescope
and then, after pointing to the next object, the focus would
revert to the same moderately elliptical PSF that I had just
corrected.  Strangely enough, the cooling weather appeared to
favor higher rather than lower focus numbers, opposite of the
usual sense, beginning at about the same time.  The result of 
this was that the image quality degraded slightly in the second
half of the night, but the data should still be useable.

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Submitted on 2008 May 1 [6:36:18]