MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2011 Jan 17

Observer(s): Jackie Faherty and Sebastien Lepine
Institution(s): AMNH

Instrument: Nellie

Worked for 9 hours (most of the night)
Conditions were Non-Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1.0 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   Mid: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate
   End: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate

Observing Summary:

Sebastien trained Jackie to use the 2.4m.  Conditions were not great.
We had medium to high winds which caused poor seeing through the second
half of the night.

We had a few technical issues.  At the start of the night the retrocam mirror needed
to be put in and then back out in order to start seeing stars.

We were unable to run centermdm.py on agung although we did not try to run it on hiltner

We had an issue with the TCS where it froze as the telescope was slewing.  The telescope turned off
as it reached the limits.  We then tried to re-adjust but the TCS was frozen so 
we had to re-boot the TCS computer completely (following the lightining shut-down
procedure through the TCS shutdown step).  After we restarted everything worked fine with the TCS for
the rest of the evening.

We also had an issue with the guider probe.  It would offset each time we moved to a new target so the 
guide stars were out of the field of view.  If we did an origin preset and then by zeroing the guide probe. 
Once this was done the offset seemed to be ok.  We had to do this a few times during the evening.



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Submitted on 2011 Jan 18 [7:42:00]