MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observer's Report for 2008 Jun 20

Observer(s): John Thorstensen, Julie Skinner
Institution(s): Dartmouth

Instrument: Echelle CCD direct + 4 in FW

Worked for 8 hours (all night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1.2 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate
   Mid: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   End: Seeing 0.9 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

A good night with mostly decent seeing (somewhat sketchy toward
the middle of the night at times).  We got a fair amount of data
but made some operator errors; in addition, as noted last night, the motor mike for the guide probe focus is 
kaputt and so we had to focus the guide probe manually.

The guide-probe focus proves to be rather difficult to tape down
effectively given the constraints -- it's so loose that it slips 
on its own due to gravity, especially at negative declinations.  
It was not difficult to get quite acceptable focus but hard to 
hold it, because it's hard to get enough tape on it to hold it
stable and because you need to focus it looking at the sky 
(with the probe in the center of the field) but then withdraw
to the slit-viewing position to get access to the probe.  If the
slide could be tightened somewhat that'd help.  It's especially
important when we get to spectroscopy that the slit-viewing 
optics focus be stable, because that's the only way to 
focus the telescope.

We had a few other glitchy things, detailed in the trouble
report.

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Submitted on 2008 Jun 21 [5:21:32]