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

Observer(s): Denney
Institution(s): OSU

Instrument: CCDS

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

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Clear, Winds Calm
   Mid: Clear, Winds Calm
   End: Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

Tonight went well.  I closed early, since I'm leaving in a couple
of hours.  Things behaved pretty well tonight though.  At one point, I wasn't
sure if the dome stopped tracking again, since I started to lose
both guide star and object counts, but I couldn't ever tell whether
the dome was the actual problem, since it didn't seem to move when
I clicked on the center dome command; maybe it was actually a 
small cloud passing over.

However, I did receive that message again about something with the 
dome timing out.  Apparently it wasn't an 'actual' error message
so it didn't show up in the log, but I'm still surprised that
it didn't list anything in the log, since I thought it would save
everything written in the status line.  Anyway, I wrote it down
this time, and it said:
 Send failed for command dome: Network operation timed out 

Then I also got a similar one right after this:
 Send failed for command track: Network operation timed out 

That's about it.  Oh, I wrote up a short memo about the stored,
residual charge problem with the new CCDS chip, where I gave
some advice for what I did about the problem, and also Rick Pogge's 
advice and scripts he wrote to deal with it.  I left a couple 
copies on the desk of the 1.3m control room, and I also put a
copy in the CCDS manual (which is still at the 2.4m).


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

Submitted on 2008 Oct 31 [3:16:06]