MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2014 Dec 15

Observer(s): John Thorstensen
Institution(s): Dartmouth

Instrument: Mark III + Templeton

Worked for 10 hours (all night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds all night.
   Beg: Seeing 1+ arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Moderate
   Mid: Seeing 1+ arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Moderate
   End: Seeing 1+ arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Moderate

Observing Summary:

See 2.4m report for description of the marginal-at-best 
conditions. 

I had a problem with Owl repeatedly refusing to accept any input,
and a little red box appearing saying  Delaying by 0 seconds ... 
please wait .  The only cure, I thought, was repeatedly restarting
Owl, and at one point I lost contact with the hardware (possibly
another instance of Owl was hogging the interface).  I went
as far as rebooting the machine, but the problem persisted -
I'd get a few exposures, and the box would appear and it would
after another exposure or so refuse to accept any input.

I believe I found the problem.  I'd inadvertently checked the
 Delay Exposure  box, and the default delay time in the 
corresponding entrybox is 0 seconds.  I have the Owl source
code, and managed to find the part that handles delayed
exposures, and it looked to me as if it didn't handle 
zero-length delays gracefully.  A couple of quick tests after
closing corroborated this. 

So, I shot myself in the foot, but I shouldn't have been able
to.



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Submitted on 2014 Dec 16 [7:03:14]