MDM Trouble Report for 2002 Jan 20

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): John Thorstensen (Dartmouth.)
Instrument: modspec+echelle

Problem(s) Encountered:
The squealing and jumping in RA which occurred from time to
time last night appear to have cured themselves for the time
being.  No idea why!

I had two real problems and one operator error which looked
like a terrible problem for a while.  Real problems:

(1) The CCD reset itself during an integration or readout.
The message was  electronics appear to be in cold reset state 
and the chip format was altered.  I just did df echelle, 
ut init, reset the format, and that was that.  I did lose a
short integration.  There was no apparent cause.

(2) The slit-viewing optics slipped again.  I fixed it by
pushing it back in.

Then the manmade problem:

When rotating the spectrograph to the parallactic angle, I 
snagged the power cord which feeds the TV cameras, the CCD
controller, and perhaps other equipment.  I first noticed this
when the TV wouldn't show anything at all.  This made me
think something had gone wrong with some part of the TV 
equipment, so I tried various tests (feeding the video from
the camera right into the monitor, etc) but nothing worked.
For about 40 terrible minutes I thought the rest of the weekend
was lost, but I eventually noticed that none of the red lights
on the various power supplied on the rotator were lit, and
then I quickly figured it out.  Lost rather more than an hour.




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Submitted on 2002 Jan 20 [7:30:55]