MDM Trouble Report for 2006 Apr 14

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Johnson, McGreer (Columbia University)
Instrument: TIFKAM

Problem(s) Encountered:
At the beginning of the night, we were pointing ~2 hours west
when the telescope lost tracking E/W, and started sliding in
that direction.  It also slid N/S at one point.  We were unable
to control it with the guider, and also the hand paddle.  We returned
to zenith and reset, but then closed anyway due to humidity.
This happened again later in the night at a similar hour angle.
Both times seemed to coincide with rapid rises in the humidity.

We have tried to use some old Prospero scripts to automatically
dither the telescope.  We had issues with the
offset command until we discovered that it would work as long
as coordinates were submitted in the current epoch.  We tried
to use the offset and guider commands in combination to dither
both the telescope and guider positions, this worked from the
command line but within a script we always got this error:

 Exposure sequence completed...
 Waiting   5-sec for the guide probe motion to complete
ERROR: network socket recvfrom() error - Invalid argument
 DONE: MISGDX=70.0 MISGDY=0.0
 Subroutine stack Line number:
 PROSPERO                0
 dith.pro               13
 Execution error in line  13
 Command: guider dx=70 dy=0
pr> guider dx=70 dy=0
 Waiting   5-sec for the guide probe motion to complete
 DONE: MISGDX=70.0 MISGDY=0.0

it seems to only happen after an avego, but we haven't
experimented more.

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

Submitted on 2006 Apr 15 [5:56:44]