MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2011 Feb 24

Observer(s): Hart, Zastrow
Institution(s): University of Michigan

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 1.6 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing 1.6 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing 1.6 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

Clear skies throughout the night. At the beginning of the night JSkyCalc would not slew the telescope. Using JSkyCalc, we ended up accidentally resetting the ra and dec in the TCS to the coordinates we were trying to slew to.  The telescope coordinates had to be homed and set manually. After that, operations resumed as normal.  We encountered difficulties with the focus. (details in trouble report).  The telescope seemed to easily come out of focus, even between exposures of the same field using the same filter.  This was the biggest difficulty and nearly all fields had to be observed several times to get the focus correct.  Using the focus command gave inconsistent results and we ended up focusing primarily using trial and error.


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Submitted on 2011 Feb 25 [5:28:24]