Problem(s) Encountered:

For the entire evening I was getting very weird  static  on the Andor PC active view screen, as if the Acquisition Autoscale had no idea what it was doing. Occasionally all would be well and I could see the sky and stars, but 98% of the time it looked like static on an old TV, preventing me from seeing anything.

In the instances that it was back to  normal , or if I manually adjusted the scaling parameters to see, virtually all stars looked overexposed/unfocused, even though we were dealing with maybe 1000-2000 counts. This made focusing extremely difficult.

I don''t think any of this can be attributed to weather - as I said, the night was almost perfectly clear. I''m not sure what''s going on in the software, and it''s a bit of a mystery to me after having spent hours troubleshooting. I look forward to Eric''s inevitable  Oh, just press this button.

It should be noted that all exposures look fine on ds9 after they''ve been taken, so it''s clearly on the  live  end of the software.

Solutions:

Came across a “Palette Select” button that seems to correct the real-time display dynamics.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t bring up a cute little selection wheel or anything, just cycles through about 6 or so display options.  I did this selection when viewing (0.1s exposures) the Xe comp lamp, but also am including a shot of the flat lamp as well.  See attachments for better clarification.  Hopefully this makes getting data a bit easier tonight.  Erek, it might be worthwhile to muck around a bit in the system prior to my departure today to see if there is anything else causing confusion.