MDM Observatory 1.3m Telescope Observing Report for 2014 Mar 31

Observer(s): Henderfun/Beatty
Institution(s): The Ohio State University

Instrument: CCDS

Worked for 9.5 hours (all night)
Conditions were Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Beg: Seeing 1.5 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   Mid: Seeing 1.8 arcsec, Clear, Winds Light & Variable
   End: Seeing 1.8 arcsec, Clear, Winds Moderate

Observing Summary:

We observed targets for the AGN14 campaign. Wind gusts gave us occasional tracking problems during the middle of the night, which caused us to raise the dropout and also switch the order of the targets.

At the very end of the night, when executing the shutdown procedure, I encountered a problem when attempting to home the dome.
The dome initially rotated past the  home  azimuth at constant speed, despite coming into contact with the power block and the lights showing green.
It continued to rotate and after making a complete rotation rotated past the home position a second time, again despite contact with the power block being made and the lights showing green.
Upon coming back into the control room, I saw that the  Home  button on the control panel had turned red.
At this point I told the dome to go to the home azimuth in the control panel, which stopped all dome motion.
I tried various things to get the dome to respond, including:
---Homing the dome via the  Dome  button on the control panel, as you do for the standard shutdown procedure,
---Clicking the  Home  button on the control panel,
---Clicking the  Center Dome  button on the control panel,
---Trying to move the dome to a user-input azimuth angle,
---Doing all of these things again after running  telescope stop  and  telescope start  in a terminal ( telescope status  returned normal results both before and after doing this),
---Refreshing the control panel throughout, and
---Disengaging and reengaging the emergency stop button in the dome.

The control panel gave the message  ERROR dome m_az not homed  throughout.

Finally, I tried switching the dome to manual in the dome and moving the dome to home position with the left/right dial in the dome, which was successful.
This caused the error message on the control panel to go away and the  Home  button to return to its normal color.
I then manually moved the dome off of the home position using the same left/right dial and used the control panel to home the dome, which worked with no troubles.

So, it appears that the dome is responding normally now, though it is unclear what caused the initial problem.

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Submitted on 2014 Apr 1 [6:09:23]