MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2004 May 18

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

Instrument: Echelle

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

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing .9 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing .8 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing .8 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

After browsing the nightly observers reports in recent history, I think we have accomplished something which hasn't happened in the last 6 months.  A complete night with subarcsecond seeing!  As Homer would say  Woo HOO! 

We accomplished a huge amount of imaging on our open cluster and globular cluster targets, with some images in the cores of the globulars with truly impressive seeing (airmass=1.24, 60 seconds in V, 0.70 arcsec).  We also observed a nice lensing target.  The only significant observing problem we ran into is that the night was too short and we ran out of dark.

There are two minor problems that we've noticed.  First, the focus encoder seems to be drifting.  When we start the telescope up in the evening, the focus encoder often reads a number around 30 points lower than the focus we left the telescope at despite the fact that the actual focus position of the telescope seems to be the same.  Second, the tcs isn't always sending the epoch correctly.  We've had several cases where the epoch ends up being 0.0, 6.0, or 8.0 instead of 2000.  Needless to say, when your epoch is 2000 years off, you're not going to find your object in the frame.

Oh, we had a mouse visitor.  However, it came in and left so swiftly and quietly that it really makes me wonder how often we have mice running under our feet in the control room.

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Submitted on 2004 May 19 [5:27:26]