MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2011 Sep 17

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

Instrument: Nellie + Leach GenIII

Worked for 11 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 1 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   End: Seeing 1 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable

Observing Summary:

A really beautiful night, photometric with decent (though not 
fantastic) seeing all night. The new controller continues to have 
noise and bias issues, but I worked on bright parallax stars for
which the data should be usable.  The sky in the early frames was 
all zeros, indicating some kind of problem with the bias -- I 
informed Bob Leach and he sent a new tim.lod file which changed 
the bias level to about 4000.  Thereafter things went smoothly,
but there still is lots of mysterious noise in the data.

It does look as if, once the noise and bias issues are resolved,
the Owl software will be reasonably good as observing 
software.  We still might want to modify or replace it, but 
it's not too inconvenient.

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Submitted on 2011 Sep 18 [6:18:20]