MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2003 Sep 20

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

Instrument: Echelle

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

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1.1 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing 1.2 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing .8 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

No problems tonight.

Conditions were much the same as they have been for the past several days.  Clear and photometric conditions, unfortunately with a lot of turbulence producing so-so seeing.  Watching the guider camera in fields with several bright stars, it was possible to both watch the individual stars go through amoeba-like ripples and see larger distortions change the overall distributions of the stars.  And when the guider is having to make 1-pixel corrections consistently, you just aren't going to get great images. 

The big difference between tonight and previous nights was the fact that the seeing has been getting better around 1:30, but last night it waited until 3:30.  The temperature kept rising up and down by a little bit over .5 degrees, so a lot of time was spent chasing the focus.

------------------------------

Submitted on 2003 Sep 21 [6:26:35]