MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2010 Mar 12

Observer(s): Schroeder and Corrales
Institution(s): Columbia

Instrument: 4K

Worked for 12 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 1.0 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing 1.0 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing 1.0 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

Beautiful skies again.

We started the night fixing the dec guide rate to 2.5 which seemed to fix last night's guiding problem.

The guider will occasionally lose connectivity and its guider monitor flickers. This causes the guiding to fail intermittently.

Fiddling with the data/power chord seemed to help but it was not consistent. I think the guiding camera system is dying.

Toward the end of the night went to HA=-3:00 and saw the same dec-oscillations (now not so serious due to fixed guiding rate).

I believe there may be a dec-drive issue in that location.

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Submitted on 2010 Mar 13 [6:24:05]