MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2012 Apr 23

Observer(s): Brown, Yan, Musin, Runge
Institution(s): University of Missouri-Columbia

Instrument: OSMOS + R4k

Worked for 8 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 1.64 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds High
   Mid: Seeing 1.45 arcsec, Clear, Winds High
   End: Seeing 1.67 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate

Observing Summary:

The weather started off cloudy in the northeast but cleared up 
early. The wind was 10-20 mph all night. The tool box mounted
on the wall opened by itself at one point and created a huge
noise. It was firmly pressed close while we were opening up
for tonight, so the strong wind could be the cause of its opening.

We had two problems tonight. 

1) The IC went down at the beginning of the night due to 
the stopping of the movie mode.  We did startup command
on the Prospero command window and it brought it right back up
and fixed the problem.

2) The telescope focus changed by a huge amount for some unknown
reason and we didn't realize this. This should happen at the end
of the night before, as when we were taking our morning twilight
flats we saw that some stars appeared in our images were
donut-shaped. However we didn't link this to the fact that the
telescope focus must have changed without us noticing it. At the
beginning of tonight, all images were out of focus, and again
we didn't think that it was the focus of the telescope but some
problem with OSMOS camfocus. Adjusting camfocus didn't improve
the situation at all (naturally). It took us almost 2 hours to
realize that it was the problem with the telescope focus, and
by adjusting it from 4425 to 4270 everything back to normal
again. However we still could not find out what could have caused the
change of the telescope focus at the end of the night before (4/22).

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Submitted on 2012 Apr 24 [6:10:57]