MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2011 Aug 31

Observer(s): Paust
Institution(s): Whitman/Dartmouth

Instrument: osmos

Worked for 6 hours (off and on through the night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds all night.
   Beg: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Overcast, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing 1.4 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

Not too much to say, lightning in the area in the afternoon so shut everything down, turned things back on in the late afternoon to do some dome flats and then shutdown again when the lightning restarted closer.  Cleared up at about 10 but then clouded over around 2:30.  Finally cleared again at 4.

Seeing was so-so at about 1.5 arcsec most of the night.

We ran into a repeatable problem with the IC computer.  After you turn it on, and start the ic program, when you try to take your first image, the write to disk hangs.  Bob refreshed me on how to start everything up at the start of the run and we ran into the problem without knowing it.  Tonight we ran into the problem after each lighting shutdown.  The IC just doesn't sync to Caliban.  Closing all of the interface programs on hiltner, rebooting the IC, and the restarting all the software fixes the problem.  The IC computer was showing write errors and giving specific track/sector/blocks for the errors.

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Submitted on 2011 Sep 1 [6:41:36]