MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2014 Jan 16

Observer(s): Simonian/Pei
Institution(s): OSU/UCI

Instrument: CCDS

Worked for 12 hours (all night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 0.9 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate
   Mid: Seeing 1.0 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   End: Seeing 0.9 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

We observed 8 AGN tonight. The night was totally clear with low 
humidity. The only problem was the winds. The seeing was fairly 
stable around 1 .

Winds were particularly problematic at the beginning of the 
night, and caused a lot of guiding errors as a result. Closing 
the doors helped ameliorate some of those errors. 

Several objects were also fairly close to the moon, so we 
increased the exposure time on the guider to 2s for those 
objects, and that also improved guiding in the middle of the 
night. 

We noticed a significant case of NS nodding at the beginning of 
the night, and at the very end. I didn't notice any others,
though I'll be paying closer attention during the middle on
upcoming days.

There might have been some focusing issues after the midnight 
standard; particularly for objects with sparse fields. Some 
images gave absurdly high seeing values, though the high values
were mainly seen for faint objects. I'm going to try and figure 
out how to best focus for these objects without relying on faint
objects.

While refocusing the telescope during PG1244, I forgot to 
disable autoguiding, which caused the object to move out of the 
slit between exposures. I didn't realize it until after I 
started the next exposure, and couldn't abort it. I managed to 
move it into a slit about 5 minutes into the exposure, so 
hopefully that data can be salvageable.

The last AGN observation finished 2 minutes into twilight.

No major technical problems were encountered during the night. 
At the very end, there was a minor TCS crash, as will be 
detailed in the trouble report.

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Submitted on 2014 Jan 17 [6:56:24]