MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2009 Jun 23

Observer(s): Parks
Institution(s): OSU

Instrument: 4k

Worked for 6 hours (most of the night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds from 723UT until 910UT.
   Beg: Seeing 1.66 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Light & Variable
   Mid: Seeing 2.01 arcsec, Overcast, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing 1.23 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

Tonight started out with a surprising amount of random clouds which
were unexpected and not very evident on the radar or forecast. 
These caused the guider to often lose track and therefor led to blurry
images.  However, when lucky, the seeing and focus were pretty good.
There was a lot of North-South movement tonight and the guider was
not functioning as well as usual in the x direction.  I also had to 
fiddle with the guider focus tonight. Eventually the 
poor images, along with a brief overcast which drizzled a bit,
caused me to stop for a while.  This gave me an opportunity to 
look up a few things to try to improve x-direction guiding.  I found the 
most effective remedy was to set the dec guide rate to 1 instead
of 2 (in addition to changing the integration time to 1 second
instead of 2 seconds.  The annoying sporadic cloud cover meant 
I had to often wait for an opportunity to get enough counts
for the guider to function.  The short windows of clear skies
forced me to concentrate on the shorter exposures (10 seconds).
Therefor I did not get many good images of NGC6633, or the 
longer exposures of Cygnus.

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Submitted on 2009 Jun 23 [4:57:28]