MDM Observatory 2.4m Telescope Observing Report for 2015 Mar 12

Observer(s): Wagner and Wilber
Institution(s): OSU

Instrument: OSMOS

Worked for 4.5 hours (part of the night)
Conditions were Non-Photometric most of the night.
Problems were encountered, see the separate trouble report for details.

Seeing and Weather:
   Clouds from 18:30 until 22:30.
   Beg: Overcast, Winds Calm
   Mid: Seeing 2 arcsec, Patchy Clouds, Winds Calm
   End: Seeing 2 arcsec, Clear, Winds Calm

Observing Summary:

Weather at the start of the night was overcast even light mist.  KPNO gave
the all-clear to open at 22:40.  After going through the opening procedures, we
encountered problems right away.  These are described in the trouble report.  

In short, the dome encoder is not working.  The dome was not under computer
control and would not set to the correct azimuth and instead continued rotating. 
We disabled auto dome and operated by turning the dome manually by adjusting it between exposures.

Second, there was something wrong with the focus encoder or the actual telescope
focus.  After recovering from the dome encoder problem and going to the setup
star, the telescope  was way out of focus at exactly the same setting we used 
for the past 3 nights.  Huge donut on the image.  Focus before was 2660.  We found
the new focus at 1650 after reseting the focus encoder by going to the  full out  
position and reseting the encoder to 0.0.  When we hit the out focus limit, the encoder
reported 455.  

During the TCS computer restart to see if we could resolve the dome encoder issue, the telescope
ran away in declination to the south.  The motion was not fast, but I hit the 
emergency stop button to halt it until I could figure out how to recover.  Paddle
slew was required to get the telescope back at the stow position.


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Submitted on 2015 Mar 13 [3:47:44]