MDM Trouble Report for 2008 Jan 18

Telescope: 1.3m
Observer(s): Denney & Grier (OSU)
Instrument: CCDS

Problem(s) Encountered:
Well, first off, our problem from last night was never completely
resolved, and tonight we were still observing without ~180 columns
reading out on one side of the chip (columns 1021 - 1200).  We 
observed like usual regardless of this, and hope that our data is
still usable.

In addition, that weird stripey structure underlying some of the
images last night right after we cycled the power on the CCDS HE 
(which eventually disappeared last night) were back in all of our
images tonight.  Since this pattern is in everything, hopefully it
will subtract out with the bias.

Finally, we encountered one new problem:  the Ne lamp seems to be
on the fritz, only correctly working and staying illuminated part
of the time, and the other part of the time, turning on fine, but 
then flickering a few times and going out.  For examples, feel 
free to look at some of our Ne comp lamp spectra in directory
/lhome/data/jd4483.*.fits: #0042 is fine, but #0057 is taken at 
nearly the same grating center and barely registers a signal.  
All Ne exposures were 30sec.  Another comparison at a different 
grating center is #0044 versus #0051, both at center 6650A.

We could watch the lamp flicker and then eventually go out with 
the slit Acquisition CCD.  Some times it worked fine, and some
times we experienced the flickering.  To maximize our signal, we
started waiting until the last moment to turn the lamp on before
starting our exposure, and could usually do OK - at least we 
hope it's good enough to get a good dispersion solution.

Oh, also the CCDOPS program for the slit Acquisition CCD locked
up, and we had to restart the computer, but were able to get
it back up fine following directions in the manual.

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Submitted on 2008 Jan 18 [6:19:09]