MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2004 May 17

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

Instrument: Echelle

Worked for 10 hours (all night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   Mid: Seeing 1.4 arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Moderate
   End: Seeing 1.3 arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Light & Variable

Observing Summary:

A good solid night of observing continuing looking at globulars, open clusters, and two lensing fields.  Weather was photometric for the first half of the night then some very light cirrus moved in.

Seeing at the beginning of the night was great...  subarcsecond at times.  However, the wind picked up (and we were observing directly into the wind) so the seeing worsened and became very variable.  However, it didn't go over 1.5 arcsec.

We had some minor computer glitches and lost around 4 exposures to errors reading out the ccd.  It always corrected itself at the next exposure.  

We are also having some general data management problems.  So far, it seems like it's only possible to tar a night's images on Chichon.  Attempting to run tar from agung (for example) stalls after writing just a few images, worse, sometimes it acts like it has completed adding all of the images to the tar file.  

My other attempts at moving data off pinatubo have been thwarted too.  The password on the board doesn't seem to be working, so I can't scp from a remote host and scping from one of the unix machines (and ftping too) stalls after sending only a few images.

This sort of problem, along with the fact that it takes 30 seconds just to display an image make me think that a nice linux file server (or even better, an X-serve) might be a great upgrade since it seems like these computers just aren't up to moving the volumes of data that we create around.

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Submitted on 2004 May 18 [5:31:08]