MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2008 Feb 22

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

Instrument: echelle CCD direct + 4in FW

Worked for 0.5 hours (part of the night)
Bad weather most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds all night.
   Beg: Overcast, Winds Moderate
   Mid: Seeing 2.5 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds High
   End: Fog/Low Clouds, Winds Moderate

Observing Summary:

Cloudy at start, and rather windy too.  A clear hole blew over 
around 11 PM, and I opened very briefly, but the seeing was bad.
Soon after that some patches of fog blew past maybe 1000 feet 
above the observatory, so I closed.  Sure enough, conditions 
deteriorated further and we were sitting in fog before too long.

A power glitch in the afternoon tripped the air conditioning 
breaker, but I caught that before too long.  Also, when closing
I triggered an extremely rare and rather amusing malfunction 
of the dome -- I was slewing into the zenith, and the dome was
moving into its desired position.  I happened to switch from
dome free to dome home when the dome was almost exactly 180
degrees from home.  The dome sat and oscillated -- it would 
start out in one direction, decide it was getting worse, then
go the other direction, and so on.  The cure was to switch to 
dome free for a moment, let it move a few degrees so the 
degeneracy was broken, and then switch to dome home again,
whereupon it proceeded on home.
This is so extremely rare that it isn't worth fixing, but 
it's kind of cool.

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Submitted on 2008 Feb 23 [5:12:24]