MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2010 Apr 11

Observer(s): Stanonik + Beygu
Institution(s): Columbia

Instrument: Direct Echelle

Worked for 11 hours (all night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   Mid: Seeing 1.2 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate
   End: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate

Observing Summary:

A fantastic end to a fantastic run!  We successfully observed 
all 60 of our program targets over the past 7 nights, almost 
always with 1 arcsecond seeing and photometric conditions.  The
weather conditions all week have been amazing, the wind picked
up a little bit tonight, and we did not encounter any serious 
problems with the telescope for the whole run.

The new guide star selecting system is wonderful, it makes things
move so much quicker and worked reliably for us all week. 

We had a few exposures scattered throughout the week that 
exhibited strange jumps in the bias level at different rows on 
the chip that made the background sky look horizontally striped.
We see the same offset in the overscan region of the chip.
We only noticed this on about 1 frame a night, and could 
successfully re-observe those images,  until tonight when we 
had a series of 8 exposures show this:
/data/chichon/obs24m/c100411/ccd.047.fits to ccd.054.fits
This feature went away when we switched to our next target.

Thanks to the staff for a great run, and good luck to the OSU
group in commissioning OSMOS!

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Submitted on 2010 Apr 12 [6:12:52]