MDM Trouble Report for 2003 Apr 25

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Nathaniel Paust (Dartmouth)
Instrument: Echelle

Problem(s) Encountered:
When I tried to open the mirror covers to do twilight flats, nothing happened.  Cycling the switch resulted in a pftt sound.  I called Bob and we figured out that the west petal had closed on top of the north and south petals.  I climbed the ladder, pried on the west petal freeing the north and south petals to open normally.  At Bob's request, I then verified that the west petal was closing incorrectly.  Indeed, it tries to close after the north and south petals.  Another ladder climb to fix it again.  Bob then had me verify that the petal would stay open through the night by slewing (it did) through a wide range of hour angles.  

Luckily, we fixed the problem fast enough that I was still able to get evening twilight flats...  of course I only had one saturated one instead of my normal 5 or 6.

I also had a problem of the tcs loosing track of the declination encoder.  It seemed to mainly occur when I issued small  telescope offset  (10 arcseconds) commands while focusing.  It was usually cleared up by using the xtcs3 window to slew to a new location and then slew back.  However, once I had to return to the zenith and reset the encoders.

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Submitted on 2003 Apr 26 [5:56:20]