MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2003 Apr 25

Observer(s): Nathaniel Paust
Institution(s): Dartmouth

Instrument: Echelle

Worked for 8 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 0.9 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing 1.6 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate
   End: Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

As mentioned in the trouble report, I had some problems with the mirror petals sticking shut since they closed in the wrong order yesterday.  This morning I was able to get them to close in the correct order by slewing to -3.5h before I tried to shut the covers.  Since I jumped the gun a bit on opening the covers, I had enough time to get the problem fixed before it impacted my observations.

I also had some trouble with the tcs not getting a response from the dec encoder.  This was more of an annoyance than a real problem because it took very little to get things working again.  Unfortunately, that annoyance got added onto the fact that the seeing was horrible in the middle of the night so I was pissed sitting in the control room.

So, how did the observing go you ask?  Pretty well...

Conditions until about 10:30 or 11 were excellent.  I was taking shorter images (60 seconds in B) and getting seeing around .9 arcsec.  At around 11, the wind started blowing and there was absolutely nothing I could do to get good images, the average seeing was around 1.6 arcsec but got as bad as 2 arcsec.  At about 2, almost like magic, things got better and the seeing dropped to around 0.7 arcsec on average (little bit worse for 120s in B, par for 90s in V, little bit better for 60s in I).  It didn't hurt that the mirror was only about 1 degree below ambient for this part of the night.

It's a shame that I couldn't stretch out that last part, I was making good progress.

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Submitted on 2003 Apr 26 [6:07:12]