MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2009 Mar 25

Observer(s): armstrong
Institution(s): columbia

Instrument: templeton/direct

Worked for 9 hours (most of the night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
No equipment or software problems were encountered.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1.2 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing 2 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   End: Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

Got one long cv time series.

At start of night, mirror would not open automatically.
Hit 'mirror' in TCS module to open, and could hear motor on NW side of
telescope grinding as it *tried* to work, but gears would not budge.  
Motor grinded for about 40 seconds, then stopped.

Hit 'refresh' on TCS; tried again - same.
Hit 'estop', tried again - nothing.

Tried manual switch on grey box on W side of telescope - nothing.

Opened mirror by manually twisting the gear.  TCS immediately 
registered that the mirror was open, so a communication problem
was ruled out. 

When I turned the tracking on, I got the following error message:
'send failed for command track: network operation timed out',
even though the tracking and dome motion worked fine.

Then things worked swimmingly until about 1am, when the guide star
began oscillating in its box, in all directions.  It *left* the 
box only once.  But this continued until I closed and made focus
bad and a few images unusable.

Mirror *closes* automatically with no problem.

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Submitted on 2009 Mar 26 [3:28:24]