MDM Trouble Report for 2005 Dec 9

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Ajay Tannirkulam, Zhaohuan Zhu (Michigan)
Instrument: Templeton

Problem(s) Encountered:
At the begining of the night we went to bright star and set the RA and Dec 
encoders. The telescope tracked the star all right initially, but it suddenly lost it and the star moved.
We assumed that telescope pointing had gone wrong, so we went back to the zenith and set the encoders again.
(This might have been the root of thr problem. I probably set the encoders incorrectly).
After this we tried going to another bright star close to the zenith. TCS complained about having reached the soft limits. 
We we went out to the telescope and saw that the telescope was close to the zenith and this could not have been true. So we tried going to another 
bright star nearby. This put the telescope at it's southern hard limit.
 
Bob and Don Terndrup got the telescope back up. Bob had to drive up to the mountain to fix the problem. 

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Submitted on 2005 Dec 10 [7:50:55]