MDM Trouble Report for 2003 Apr 10

Telescope: 1.3m
Observer(s): Garmany (Columbia)
Instrument: direct + Nellie

Problem(s) Encountered:
a) Problem with crash of TCS (Dell) solved by a call to Bob. 
Another call required when we couldn't reset the RA and DEC 
encoders.
The box for epoch was a light pink, and it wouldn't accept an
 entry when we tried to update the RA and DEC. We tried closing 
xtcs3 once without success. Second time (Bob's suggestion) got it
working. I'm still not sure when we did to confuse it the first
time (or confuse us!)

b) Just a warning that we encountered the guide star rapidly
 drifting out of the box repeatedly when the telescope was
at HA 1 hour, DEC +2 deg. This only happened once, for a period
 of about 30 minutes. When we moved to another part of the sky
there was no problem. In each case, the telescope moved north.

c) While we were solving the early evening problems, our students 
had a fire in the toaster oven. They used the fire extinguisher
to put it out, and no damage seems to have been done to the
 counter. All report that there was a lot of stuff stuck in the
 oven which presumably caught fire.




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Submitted on 2003 Apr 11 [5:00:22]