MDM Trouble Report for 2002 May 18

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Vestergaard (OSU)
Instrument: ccds

Problem(s) Encountered:
All of a sudden in the very final stages of moving to a new
target (~2am) the RA/DEC encoders didn't respond. The telescope could
not be moved with the hand-paddles or by entering a new target
and requesting a move. However, I could move the telescope using
prospero - but only in E-W direction at some point later.
I tried to power down the telescope as when stowing the telescope
at the end of the night, but I had to resort to exiting the tcs
program and cycling the power on the tcs pc to boot it (used
the lightening-power-down procedure). It seemed to cure the
problems.

I was rather surprised to NOT find any mentioning of this problem 
in the telescope manual. It would be useful to have it as part 
of the trouble-shooting pages at least (so it is easy to find).

And now just an aside question: What exactly does the caliban
command `colfocus reset' do? When I took over the telescope and
CCDS, the colimator focus was at a value close to zero. I reset
it close to the usual value around 850 and focused the 
spectrograph. Later I realized that someone had left this command
`colfocus reset' in the caliban window, obviously having forgotten
to send the command to caliban. I just wanted to know if the
fact that the colimator focus has not been reset affects the
performance of the spectrograph? Or (hopefully) does it only
affect the value of the best focus? I didn't want to mess with
it since it appears to be working (light is coming through CCDS
and I can focus but as I am doing far-blue where calibration 
lines are few and some blended, it isn't easy to tell if it does
not focus perfectly). Need I do anything?

Thanks,
	Marianne

------------------------------

Submitted on 2002 May 18 [5:34:29]