MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2013 Jan 08

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

Instrument: Modspec + Templeton

Worked for 13 hours (all night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds High
   Mid: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds High
   End: Seeing 1-10 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable

Observing Summary:

A nice clear night, but quite windy for the first half and 
marred by some comically awful seeing around 3 AM.  This
correlated with a rapid increase in the ambient temperature.

xmis2 has been slow for the last few days and became intolerable
tonight.  I popped a terminal on hiltner and run top -- it 
showed that xmis2 was taking 95 percent of the memory!  I had to 
kill it and restart, which was itself a bit dodgy -- first
I quit the application, but it wouldn't quit, so I killed the 
window; then I tried to make a new instance, but it complained
that it couldn't get the port it needed, so I had to kill the
old instance from the command line.

I was thinking about the annoying date confusion with the 
observing report from the other night, and it occurred to me
that it would be less error-prone to present the user with the 
option of selecting the just-completed night.  Also, in
astronomy, unlike in a teenager's love life, double-dating 
tends to avoid ambiguity. 



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Submitted on 2013 Jan 9 [7:13:04]