MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2010 Nov 03

Observer(s): Joe Antognini
Institution(s): OSU

Instrument: OSMOS

Worked for 10 hours (most of the 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 1.3 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   End: Seeing 1.4 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable

Observing Summary:

The wind was only moderate tonight and subsided fairly early on.  The seeing was
not great, but good enough for imaging.

It took a little while to get the telescope pointed initially, but once it was
pointed I was off and running.  I didn't have any guider focus issues tonight.
I started off taking some images of standard stars and moved on to a spectrum of
Kate's object.  Later in the night conditions were good for the UDS field, but I
only got one good image.  Around this point one of the metallic hoses for the
air conditioning became wedged in between the edge of the base of the mirror and
one prong of the fork the telescope is mounted on.  As a result the telescope
couldn't move at all in declination.  It took two hours to figure out what was
going on, fix it, and restore the pointing.

Once that problem was fixed, the UDS field was low in the sky, so I moved on to
some BVRI images of clusters for Atlee.  I then wrapped up the night with a
number of calibrations.

All in all not a perfect night, but much better than last night.


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Submitted on 2010 Nov 4 [7:17:23]