MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2011 Sep 16

Observer(s): Thorstensen
Institution(s): Dartmouth

Instrument: Nellie direct + Leach GenIII 

Worked for 8 hours (most of the night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   High Humidity from 8+ until 11.
   Beg: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Moderate
   Mid: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds High
   End: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate

Observing Summary:

Looked good at start, then an interval of high humidity forced 
closure, then opened again -- pretty windy second half, but 
cleared off and humidity dropped very substantially, Monsoon is
over.

The big story, of course, is the first use of the new Gen III
controllers, with Nellie.  Unfortunately, there are some serious
issues.  Problems started when we went to a subarray for
focusing - the image showed only noise, below bias, with 
positive spikes.  This finally went away when we power-cycled
the controller, but at low light levels the image shows lots of 
noise in the form of high pixels and little horizontal dark 
streaks, one row wide and maye a couple dozen pixels long. 

For this reason I used retrocam for several hours to get a light
curve, and didn't do too much with the primary instrument.

On the brighter side, I did test out the scripts I've written
to adapt Owl to our observatory -- on the software side, it's
at least reasonably usable.  

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Submitted on 2011 Sep 17 [6:32:41]