MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2007 Jul 21

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

Instrument: Modspec + Echelle CCD

Worked for 1 hours (off and on through the night)
Bad weather most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds all night.
   Beg: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Light & Variable
   Mid: Overcast, Winds Moderate
   End: Overcast, Winds Light & Variable

Observing Summary:

Heavy rain at 5 PM, with lightning shutdown (though it never
got close to the observatory).  Clearing around sunset, so
opened, but it quickly clouded over.  A hole appeared around
11 PM -- stayed open for the better part of an hour, but the
humidity spiked rapidly forcing closure. Not too long after
that, it started to pour, and there was more electrical activity
forcing another shutdown; fog and drizzle stayed around for
teh rest of the night. I did get a little useful data in
the hole, keeping my streak of getting something every night
despite the generally poor weather.

In the cloudy intervals I made minor modifications to the
PCGUIDER program, i.e. the one that is used with the DTI and
not the one used for the more usual offset guiding.  The only
substantive changes are that I've changed the default
parameters to be more useful in practice, so it should work
out of the box, as it were.  I should have done this long
ago!  I also changed the opening banner presented to the
user when the machine starts up to make it a bit clearer.

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Submitted on 2007 Jul 22 [4:23:42]