MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2012 Sep 02

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

Instrument: 4K

Worked for 5 hours (part of the night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds all night.
   Beg: Overcast, Winds Calm
   Mid: Cirrus, Winds Calm
   End: Patchy Clouds, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

We completed an emergency shut down in the afternoon due to lightning nearby.  
After we successfully brought up the system from a lightning shutdown we found a residual 13 minutes of time (RA) offset in the pointing.  
This was precisely the offset we found when first using the telescope after the instrument was installed.
So this might be an error associated with cycling the TCS. The error seems to be essentially purely in RA, not Dec.

It was raining and extremely overcast in the beginning of the night.  It finally started to clear up around 22:30, so we started taking calibration data.

We opened the dome around 23:00 and observed off and on until about 03:30.  In the beginning of the observations there were non-photometric conditions.
As the night progressed the clouds became much worse and we called it a night at 03:30.

No other problems were noted.

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Submitted on 2012 Sep 3 [4:03:33]