MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2012 Jun 28

Observer(s): Gaidos (for Lepine)
Institution(s): Hawaii

Instrument: R4K

Worked for 5 hours (last half of the night)
Conditions were Non-Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds from 7 PM until 11 PM.
   Beg: Overcast, Winds Calm
   Mid: Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   End: Patchy Clouds, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

Cumulus clouds developed before sunset and in the early evening there
were threatening thunderstorms to the south and southeast as well as a
smaller one to the northwest.  These moved away but solid cloud cover
persisted until about 11 PM.  I opened up around that time and
observed continuously until around 4:20 AM local, although some
scattered clouds interfered with guiding observing towards the end of
the night.

Only technical issue during the night was the absence of internet
access (now fixed) and my inability to find the very nice JSkyCalcGS
program on the 1.3m computers.  My personal documentation from Sept
2011 points to a script called  runjskgs  which sits at /lhome/obs13m
and calls a .jar file in the local/usr/pkg directory.  The script is
still there, but the java file is not.  I was unable to find it
anywhere on McGraw and the option to run Skycalc under Astronomy Tools
menu does not work (and never has).  Without JSkyCalcGS I had a much
harder time finder guide stars, especially since the R4K crowds out
much of the guideprobe's space.

------------------------------

Submitted on 2012 Jun 29 [13:26:34]