MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2007 Apr 18

Observer(s): Werk and Putman
Institution(s): U Michigan

Instrument: MkIII

Worked for 6 hours (off and on through the night)
Conditions were Non-Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Cirrus, Winds Calm
   Mid: Patchy Clouds, Winds Calm
   End: Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

Clouds at beginning of night, and in the middle, they got a little thicker. We think it 
cleared toward the end of the night, but due to TCS crash (see below and trouble
report) we were a but too preoccupied to thoroughly check the sky. 

Problem 1: we redid the course focus of the guider camera. lost approximately 30 minutes. 
Problem 2: Pointing was consistently bad tonight due probably to the new TCS
computer installed during the day. We wasted alot of time trying to find bright stars
at nearly every new position. 
We managed to straighten out the pointing pretty well to be able to do our blind offsets
and got going on our targets. 
Problem 3: at about 2am we started getting warnings that coordinates couldn't be
set, that TCS had timed out, etc. We tried restarting xtcs, reinitializing, and that didn't
help at all. Ultimately, we ended up rebooting the TCS computer, which lost us a bunch of time. 
Problem 4: after we rebooted, and got pointing to an OK point, we could not reset the instrument
rotator encoder. Right now, it reads 0, when in actuality it is 80 or so
We managed to set up on one more target before sunrise. 

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Submitted on 2007 Apr 19 [4:11:41]