MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2002 Jun 13

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

Instrument: modspec

Worked for 9 hours (all night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 2 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate
   Mid: Seeing 2 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate
   End: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable

Observing Summary:

Time series spectroscopy of cataclysmic binaries.  Clear all
night, though some very thin high cloud was evident on horizon
at sunset and sunrise.  Seeing was highly variable and sometimes
very poor, but usually OK.  

At the beginning the finder mirror trouble repeated when I first
sourced my wavelength cal script from CCDCOM.  CCDCOM complained
it could not move anything in the MIS, and the MIS responded 
abnormally to requests from CCDCOM to move things.  This time
I thought to stop and restart CCDCOM as well as xmis, and 
that cured the problem.  (CCDCOM had been running for several
days, I had not restarted it since I had the glitch last night).
It would seem that the problem lies in the communications 
between xmis and CCDCOM rather than hardware.  I've used this 
same script for many scores of nights over the years without
running into this problem, so it's a rare one.

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Submitted on 2002 Jun 14 [5:22:22]