MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2012 Jan 23

Observer(s): Pinkney & Pleshinger
Institution(s): Ohio Northern University

Instrument: Modspec + Nellie

Worked for 3 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:
   High Humidity from 5am until sleep.
   Beg: Overcast, Winds High
   Mid: Seeing 2. arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Light & Variable
   End: Patchy Clouds, Winds Light & Variable

Observing Summary:

We started with little hope of opening because the Owl software was
not giving us fits headers.  Bob got it fixed to the point where
it would put the exposure time and time into the headers.  It was cloudy 
when he left around 8:30-9:30 pm.  Around 10:30 it looked like it
was clear enough to observe so we opened and started observing.  
This was short-lived however, as the winds reached 40 mph at the
2.1m and 4.0m by around 11:30.  So we aborted our exposure and
closed up.  
Around 3:20 we noticed that the winds had subsided to ~7 MPH 
and the sky was mostly clear.  Humidity was up a little to 60%.
Right away we ran into a problem with Owl which was probably caused
by the way we aborted the image.  The Owl error message was:
 ERROR Invalid RET reply aafde (0xaafde)  followed by:
 ERROR No image file saved. Use buffer dump to rescue image 
data .  We tried clicking  Dump image buffer  under OPTIONS 
giving it a name  buffdump.fit .  This did not dump the 
galaxy spectrum we had aborted but some other calibration
spectrum.  It did not solve the  ERROR ...  messages that
kept coming up if we tried to click  EXPOSE .  So we shut down
Owl and restarted it.  We followed J. Thorstensen's OWL manual and 
guess what ... the fits headers are now working.  We used the
LOAD button to load  mdmheader.xml  and the  Update Script: 
window to load getmdmheader.bsh.  So that's one good thing that
came of the night.
Back to our second opening.  This time we didn't last long before
we noticed the  RELATIVE HUMIDITY EXCEEDS 85%  warning.  This was 
in the middle of what promised to be our 2nd and best galaxy
spectrum.  But we aborted and shutdown anyways.
Just before starting our last exposure, we tried using the
rotator for the first time and ran into a problem.  It rotated
17 degrees CCW but we wanted 13 degrees so I tried to move back CW
to 13 and it would not budge.  It only clicked.  After aborting
our exposure, we fixed this problem by power cycling the box for
the rotator.  Then it worked and allowed us to rotate back to 
0 deg before closing the mirror covers. 
One final problem for the night:  as I was doing something with 
the firefox window when Kwin crashed.  It brought up a window
asking if I wanted to save the information.  I said yes but
the screen hung when I tried to select a directory for the crash
log file.  I was forced to exit the whole session for Obs24m
and restart it again.  Note that I was able to bring up the
Owl header window again.

------------------------------

Submitted on 2012 Jan 24 [6:37:32]