MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2016 Feb 19

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

Instrument: Modspec + echelle ccd

Worked for 11 hours (all night)
Conditions were Mixed most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds all night.
   Beg: Seeing 1+ arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing 1+ arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing 1 arcsec, Cirrus, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

A lot of moonlit cirrus through the night, but some intervals of
mostly clear sky -- actually worked all night, which was much 
better than expected, and got a fair amount done.  Two items of
note: (1) I did a  set UT  at the start of the night and noticed
that the RA jumped by over 10 seconds.  Evidently the TCS computer
clock isn't very accurate (and I suppose OS/2 predates widespread
use of NTP), which contributes significantly to the pointing
sloppiness.  Observers should be urged to 'set UT' often. (2) I 
did run a pointing test, and it showed very significant 
degradation of the pointing coefficients (I haven't reduced
it yet, but it was obvious).  A quick bit of advice is to
go farther south on southerly targets and farther north on
northerly targets, but the HA is involved also. 

Basically, everything worked very nicely.

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Submitted on 2016 Feb 20 [7:02:41]