MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2012 Oct 07

Observer(s): Colon
Institution(s): UH

Instrument: Nellie Direct

Worked for 6 hours (first half of the night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Clear, Winds Calm
   Mid: Clear, Winds Calm
   End: Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

When I went to take dome flats in the afternoon, I encountered an error in the TCS gui that said:   focus sec not homed 

I immediately called Bob and followed his instructions to home the focus drive and also the HA and Dec drives as they were showing errors as well.

I was able to get on sky with no problems after that (but it was too late for sky flats at that point so I went straight to my target).

Everything was working fine until 00:30 when all of a sudden the tracking turned off by itself and I got an error in the TCS gui that said:  dome m_az not homed .

Upon checking the TCS log I saw that all the errors had returned (i.e. that the focus Sec and m_ha were also not homed). 

I eventually figured out to manually move the dome to the home position, which fixed that problem.

I then tried to move the telescope to zenith manually using the hand paddle before homing the focus and the HA and Dec drives, but the paddle wasn't working.

I also have an error in the TCS gui that says any command cannot be sent because   Socket is not connected 

We (the 2.4m observer and I) think I might have accidentally hit the hour angle limit (which I thought was only for objects with declination > 70, and I didn't think to look out for since my object had a declination of +29 degrees).

At this point I am waiting to hear back from Bob on how to proceed.

I submitted a trouble report on the above problems as well.

NOTE: I did not fill the dewar because the telescope was not in a position to fill it but also because the next observer is using a different instrument.



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Submitted on 2012 Oct 8 [5:12:29]
NOTE: This report replaces the previous 1.3m telescope
      observing report for 2012 Oct 07