MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2007 Jan 30

Observer(s): John Thorstensen
Institution(s): Dartmouth

Instrument: Echelle CCD direct + 2in FW

No Observing (see comments below)
Bad weather most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Fog all night.

Observing Summary:

Some rain during the day, and fog all night.  No way.  If you're
Simpsons fan, brighten your morning by imagining Krusty saying
 I got NOTHING to work with here! .  So I'll use this report for
a couple of other items:

1) My parallax program requires accurate (few-arcsecond) framing
of images.  I have found that I can achieve this accuracy in
practice by pre-positioning the MIS guide probe to the location of a 
preselected guide star, and then placing the guide star in
a consistent location on the TV.  Skycalcdisp.py on Agung 
offers a GUI tool for guide star selection, and the whole 
process is fast, convenient, and amazingly accurate. This 
should be of great use to all users of CCDS, TIFKAM, and the 
direct imagers.  It won't drop a star  into a spectroscopic 
slit sight-unseen, but it will get you very close.  I have 
written up an HTML manual that describes this procedure very 
completely (so it can be adopted by novices); Bob has posted 
this on the mountaintop web server.  Please make your observers
aware of this procedure.

2) This isn't  trouble , but this run I've been more aware
of the nasty electronic whining sound coming from the 19-inch
Samsung flat-panel monitors on Hiltner.  It's probably not worth
replacing them yet, but they may be headed for early retirement.
Maybe the noisier one (left) could be swapped with Agung's 
monitor, which isn't always used?  After about 13 hours it
gets kind of old.

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

Submitted on 2007 Jan 31 [5:16:53]