From crb@ing.iac.esThu Jul 16 14:06:49 1998
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 19:03:36 +0100 (BST)
From: Chris Benn <crb@ing.iac.es>
To: Juerg Rey <juerg@ing.iac.es>
Cc: Peter Sorensen <pms@ing.iac.es>
Subject: Re: weather downtime, telescope log book

Hi Juerg

My recommendation would be to treat time marred by poor weather e.g.
very bad seeing, in the same way as time marred by technical problems
such as unusually high noise on detector, or bad tracking, which allow
observing to continue but with poorer-quality data being generated.
If the conditions are so bad that the original science programme can't be
carried out, and the observers switch to a backup programme, I'd say this
was time lost to bad weather, since the conditions are preventing the
telescope from fulfilling the function for which funding is provided.
If the observers are able to continue with the programme, but are only
getting data equivalent (e.g. in terms of signal-to-noise) to N hours
per night, then I'd say that all but N hours were lost to weather.
The observer should be invited to provide an estimate.

Hope this helps

Chris