MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2001 Jun 26

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

Instrument: modspec + echelle

Worked for 9 hours (all night)
Conditions were Non-Photometric most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate
   Mid: Seeing 1 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   End: Seeing 1 arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

Good weather, a little light cloud from time to time.
Some breeze and and temperature equilibriation gave bad seeing
intermittently in the first hour, then it improved to be pretty
good (in all these spectroscopic nights the seeing I'm 
reporting is a rough guesstimate from the TV screen, not a 
real scientific-like measurement).

Ran on generator to avoid any power glitches from 
commercial (since UPS isn't functioning correctly); things
flickered a bit from time to time but not badly. 

There were a couple of minor telescope anomalies, which I think
are small TCS bugs, below the level of  trouble  reports.  
Both of these have happened before, I believe.
The auto-set occasionally settles to a position a few tenths of
a second of time away from that desired.  This is below the 
absolute pointing accuracy but will affect offsets.  Second,
on rare occasions the auto-set doesn't complete -- it appears 
to be there but the HA field in the  Next Object  line does 
not go to asterisks and the paddle stays locked out.  The cure
is just to hit  stop  in xtcs, since you're actually there.

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Submitted on 2001 Jun 27 [5:23:06]