MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2012 Oct 02

Observer(s): Colon
Institution(s): UH

Instrument: R4K

Worked for 1 hours (part of the night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Clear, Winds Calm
   Mid: Clear, Winds Calm
   End: Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

While the weather was perfect tonight, I had problems with the R4K, and only ended up observing for about one hour.

I submitted a trouble report detailing the problems I encountered, and I also describe them here.

I took a few bias and dome flats in the beginning of the night that looked fine, but then one dome flat showed a funky pattern of alternating lines with counts changing from 0 to 65k.
This pattern persisted in subsequent images.

I called Bob at that point and he had me turn the red electronic box attached to the instrument off and then on again.
Then I typed  seqinit  in the IC terminal.

I tested taking a bias and the image turned out fine.  I proceeded to get on sky with no problems after that.

Everything was going perfectly, but after observing for less than an hour, one of the exposures showed that same pattern again but only in 3/4 of the image.  
I let the cycle of exposures finish (since there was only more in that series), and the last image showed the same pattern but over the entire image again.

I performed the same steps as above to try to fix the problem, but this time when I took a bias to test the image, I saw the same funky pattern.

Given that turning the red electronic box off and on again did not fix the problem this time, I called Bob again, but there is really nothing else I can do to fix the problem right now, so it looks like I am done for the night.

Bob said he will take a look at the instrument tomorrow.

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

Submitted on 2012 Oct 3 [4:04:26]