MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2014 Mar 11

Observer(s): Clowe
Institution(s): Ohio University

Instrument: Andor/Mk III

Worked for 8 hours (all night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Clear, Winds Calm
   Mid: Clear, Winds Calm
   End: Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

Eric, Paul, & Tony managed to get the Andor mounted on the Mk III
(with only having to re-engineer part of the Mk III).  I get a
0.405 /pixel plate scale, so slightly over 3' fov.  Reading out
at fastest speed unbinned is 7.3 Hz, and generates 25 Gbytes per
hour (fortunately for our disk space, after 15 minutes I decided
that was sufficient and switched to 2s and later 10s exposures).
Watching movies of globular clusters taken at 7.3 Hz long 
enough can make one dizzy.

Only problem I encountered (after Eric reminded me that I needed
to move the finder probe out of the way), was that the Andor
program stopped talking to the camera twice (or at least I assume
it did, it stopped reading out).  I could fix this by quitting
and restarting the Andor program, but couldn't find any way to 
force a write to disk of whatever portion of the observing sequence
had been completed by that time.  

The ability to judge image quality on the Andor readout would 
be significantly improved if we could find an inverted 
greyscale palette for the program.

Judging by eye, seeing varied between about 0.6  and 1.4 , often
covering the full range within a few seconds.  The observer
started losing focus around 4:15 and called it a night.

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Submitted on 2014 Mar 12 [4:23:41]