MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2010 Jun 02

Observer(s): Schroeder
Institution(s): Columbia

Instrument: Templeton

Worked for 9 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 0.9 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing 1 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable

Observing Summary:

Beautiful night. One problem happened when taking an image:

*** WARNING: Unexpected change of format to 41120x41120 binned 41120x41120
    (updating to reflect this)
Not enough memory (max words 8601598).
1169> rc
Not enough memory (max words 8601598).

I've seen this before, and it's easy to recover from, but in interest of full transparency I thought I'd report it.

I got worried about the memory allocation before realizing that the format had changed,
and it looks like data/chichon is 89% full. Maybe some old data can be removed?

Additionally, the track rate was set to 15.0675 instead of 15.0674 as Jules had asked. I saw some EW elongation in my images.

I changed it to 15.0674 for tomorrow night, so I'll let you know if that fixes it, or if a new track rate is needed.

Unlike last night, the dome homed properly (last night it was off by about 2.5 degrees).

As Jules presciently had warned me last night, it's easy to slip and mess up the RA/Dec encoders. I did so this morning trying
to remember how to reset the tracking. I'll need to check on the pointing tomorrow evening because of this.

But really good data anyway!


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Submitted on 2011 Jun 3 [5:07:58]