MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2011 Aug 29

Observer(s): Paust et al.
Institution(s): Dartmouth

Instrument: MDM4K

Worked for 10 hours (all night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds from 1 until 3.
   Beg: Seeing 1 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

The night started off with good conditions, possibly photometric, but clouds moved in around 1.  The clouds thinned enough to continue observing after approximately two hours, but definitely didn't become photometric.

Seeing at the start of the night was right at 1 arcsec, degrading to 1.5 arcsec later in the night.

We had a serious problem with the telescope trying to do twilight flats, the telescope refused to move.  Jules Halpern came down from the 2.4 and helped us.  Apparently the  telescope start  command wasn't correctly starting the tcs server.  Running a kludge script fixed the problem for the rest of the night.

We also had a minor problem with zeroing the telescope pointing.  When you type  zero ra=... dec=...  the system apparently assumes that those coordinates are in the 2011.7 epoch.

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Submitted on 2011 Aug 30 [6:02:35]