MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2002 Jan 19

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

Instrument: modspec+Echelle

Worked for 11 hours (all night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

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

Observing Summary:

Varied program of cataclysmic binaries and related objects.
The night started out with patchy high clouds, some of them 
opaque, but these went away around midnight as temperature 
dropped and a breeze picked up.  

The squealing and jumping around in RA which happened last 
night did not recur tonight.  I had not done anything to fix
it (!) and at the end of the night it was about as cold as
last night, so I don't know why it got better.

I had two real problems and one operator error which looked
like a terrible problem for a while.  Real problems:

(1) The CCD reset itself during an integration or readout.
The message was  electronics appear to be in cold reset state 
and the chip format was altered.  I just did df echelle, 
ut init, reset the format, and that was that.  I did lose a
short integration.  There was no apparent cause.

(2) The slit-viewing optics slipped again.  Simply pushed
the probe back in ...

Then the manmade problem:

When rotating the spectrograph to the parallactic angle, I 
snagged the power cord which feeds the TV cameras, the CCD
controller, and perhaps other equipment.  I first noticed this
when the TV wouldn't show anything at all.  This made me
think something had gone wrong with some part of the TV 
equipment, so I tried various tests (feeding the video from
the camera right into the monitor, etc) but nothing worked.
For about 40 terrible minutes I thought the rest of the weekend
was lost, but I eventually noticed that none of the red lights
on the various power supplied on the rotator were lit, and
then I quickly figured it out.  Lost rather more than an hour.




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Submitted on 2002 Jan 20 [7:28:17]