MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2011 Dec 23

Observer(s): Halpern, McCarrick, Gordon
Institution(s): Columbia

Instrument: CCDS

Worked for 13 hours (all night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 2. arcsec, Clear, Winds High
   Mid: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds High
   End: Seeing 3. arcsec, Clear, Winds High

Observing Summary:

Since the pointing was lost at the end of last night, I had
to recover it with the tilt meters and a bright star.  This
takes some luck, since with the spectrograph there is no
wide-field imager to rely on.  It took about 40 minutes.

This was a much better night than last night.  The winds were
always high, but we managed to avoid pointing into the wind
so it had no effect on the telescope.  Seeing was mostly pretty
good, but it degraded toward the end of the night.  The telescope
slewing was somewhat better than yesterday; although the
declination still has trouble completing a slew to the north,
it wasn't as bad as last night.  The pointing was mostly good,
although it got off by a few arcminutes about three times,
and we had to zero on a bright star.  Homing the telescope
at the end was easier, but still took a few tries.  I will
see at the beginning of the next night whether the pointing
was preserved or not during this process.  I have some doubts.

Prospero still creates a few duplicate files, but who cares?


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Submitted on 2011 Dec 24 [6:59:43]