MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2016 Oct 25

Observer(s): Alper
Institution(s): Dartmouth

Instrument: Andor

Worked for 6 hours (all night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

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

Observing Summary:

Conditions were excellent; Andor was not.

For the entire evening I was getting very weird  static  on the
Andor PC active view screen, as if the Acquisition Autoscale had
no idea what it was doing. Occasionally all would be well and I
could see the sky and stars, but 98% of the time it looked like
static on an old TV, preventing me from seeing anything.

In the instances that it was back to  normal , or if I manually
adjusted the scaling parameters to see, virtually all stars
looked overexposed/unfocused, even though we were dealing with
maybe 1000-2000 counts. This made focusing extremely difficult.

I don't think any of this can be attributed to weather - as I
said, the night was almost perfectly clear. I'm not sure what's
going on in the software, and it's a bit of a mystery to me
after having spent hours troubleshooting. I look forward to
Eric's inevitable  Oh, just press this button. 

It should be noted that all exposures look fine on ds9 after
they've been taken, so it's clearly on the  live  end of the
software.

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Submitted on 2016 Oct 26 [6:18:38]