MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2016 Feb 14

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

Instrument: Modspec + echelle CCD

Worked for 12 hours (all night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds from start until midn..
   Beg: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Light & Variable
   Mid: Seeing 1.5-3 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Moderate
   End: Seeing 1+ arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate

Observing Summary:

Jules Halpern pointed out yesterday that the troubles I was 
having last night were similar to a problem reported a couple
weeks ago, which traced to a bad connection to the sensor on 
hard point 1.  This proved to be the case -- when I'd looked
at the HP readings last night, the problem was evidently 
not occurring, so I missed the diagnosis. Good thing I'm not 
a doctor, or at least THAT kind of doctor. In any case, simply
typing H1 on the air bag computer at Eric's direction solved the
problem.  

The night had lots of high cloud in the first half, but was 
pretty clear for the rest of the time.  Seeing ranged from OK
to atrocious at times.  It was windier than last night but 
fairly moderate.  

This afternoon I powered the TCS down and back up without 
incident, in hopes of solving the jitter problem (it didn't
help, of course) and had to reacquire pointing early on.
As part of this I did a very careful determination of the 
tilt meter readings in the zenith - +0.05, -0.03 for the 
modspec slit-viewing camera -- and posted the result. 

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Submitted on 2016 Feb 15 [7:20:55]