MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2009 Sep 08

Observer(s): K. Schlesinger
Institution(s): OSU

Instrument: CCDS

No Observing (see comments below)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds from 7 until 1:30.

Observing Summary:

At the beginning of the night, the sky was very cloudy with 
lightning on the horizon (safely distant!). The clouds passed by 
around 1-1:30 am although there was still haze. 
I opened at around 1:30 am. There was no problem with pointing etc. 
However, once I got to a target, there was a lot of jitter, both in 
the guider and the acquisition camera images. The targets moved both 
N-S and E-W, in and out of the slit. The jitter was so bad, I could 
not even guide. I thought this might be a problem with cloud (it 
wasn't a wind issue as the wind speed was quite low all night) and 
tried targets in various locations all over the sky. However, 
the jitter problem was there for all of them. After talking to the 
1.3m observers, who were having no problems guiding, I thought there 
might be something wrong with the guider. I checked all the tvguider 
parameters with those in the manual, etc. to no avail. The jitter 
problem would not go away. The 1.3m observers were even nice enough 
to come up and check out the problem and confirmed that they didn't 
know the origin of the problem or how to fix it either. After banging my 
head against this problem for a very long frustrating time, I came to 
the conclusion that I couldn't figure out how to fix it and closed 
up early, around 3:45 am. 

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Submitted on 2009 Sep 9 [4:19:08]