MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2009 Apr 08

Observer(s): Atlee
Institution(s): OSU

Instrument: TIFKAM

Worked for 10 hours (most of the night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds from 6 until 8.
   Beg: Seeing 2.0 arcsec, Overcast, Winds Moderate
   Mid: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate
   End: Seeing 1.2 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate

Observing Summary:

I spent most of last night getting acquainted with the
peculiarities of IR observing.  I think I have a pretty good
handle on how things work now.  The only major difficulty I 
experienced was the fact that the 'NORTH', 'SOUTH', etc. commands
in Prospero do not produce reproducible position offsets, which
appeared to confuse the TCS, but I eventually figured out a
workaround.

The weather was reasonably good once the clouds cleared, but the
seeing remained moderately poor throughout the night.

This difficulty caused me to lose a significant amount of time
while I searched for bugs in my dithering code and it also
resulted in the first groups of images I collected having dubious
value, but I eventually managed a workaround (see trouble 
report).

I also had a rather bizarre error in which the tracking stopped
working and the paddle wouldn't respond.  This was relatively
simply resolved by returning the telescope to zenith.

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Submitted on 2009 Apr 9 [7:06:07]