MDM Trouble Report for 2005 Dec 23

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Jules Halpern, Sudhi Tyagi (Columbia U.)
Instrument: CCDS

Problem(s) Encountered:
While in the middle of running the standard script for many
calibrations of CCDS, Caliban stopped writing the files to
disk on Hiltner even though the exposures were continuing.
Since I am not an expert on how to recover from this, I did
a complete rstart of the system as partially described in the
notebook for queue observers, and partly in the CCDS manual.
It took a long time to understand it, and finally the grating
tilt had to be redone, so the initial calibrations were going
to be useless anyway.  I was very lucky that Bob can now log
in from home and see what is on the computer screen, and he
talked me through resetting the grating tilt.  By the way,
I'm not convinced that the procedure, using CENTER and NEWCENTER
is really doing what it says.  Maybe there is a sign error, or
maybe I am just sleepy, but it is tedious.  And Prospero
didn't recognize the command GRATTILT. I never found
out what might have caused the Caliban problem to begin with.
Probably an expert could have copied the files and fixed Caliban
in a less drastic way.

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

Submitted on 2005 Dec 24 [5:52:56]