MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2013 Mar 18

Observer(s): Jacob brown, Marat Musin
Institution(s): University of Missouri Columbia

Instrument: OSMOS

Worked for 10 hours (all night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds all night.
   Beg: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Light & Variable
   Mid: Seeing 1.467 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   End: Seeing 1.84 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable

Observing Summary:

At the beginning of the night, we had an issue with the pointing. 
The telescope was off a significant amount that caused the bright 
stars we went to not to show up in the roi4k at all. At first we 
were not sure this was due to the clouds or the pointing. Once we 
determined the pointing was off we pointed to the zenith to 
recover pointing as said in the manual. After doing the steps in 
the manual, we successfully recovered pointing and we able to 
move on. We lost about 1 1/2 hours to this mainly because at the 
time it was partially cloudy and interfering with trying to find 
stars to do the pointing with in the first place. 

Earlier in the day Eric changed the tracking on the RA to see if
he could improve on the tracking conditions. After the pointing
issue we changed the tracking rate to the value from the previous
night to make sure we wouldn't have the same problem again.

Around 11 pm we had an issue with clouds again that interfered 
with our observations for about 30 minutes. After about midnight 
the sky cleared up

Another issue that popped up again last night was on a few 
exposures, the guide star would start moving around in the 
window very erratically and either start doing a 
counter-clockwise rotation or once it left the field completely
and the guider switched to another guide star half way through
the exposure. When this happen it normally ruined the exposure 
and had to be retaken. 

We would like to thank the support staff at the 2.4m for their 
assistance in this run. 

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Submitted on 2013 Mar 19 [6:50:03]