MDM Trouble Report for 2006 Sep 2

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): John Thorstensen (Dartmouth)
Instrument: modspec + echelle CCD

Problem(s) Encountered:
The telescope continues to lose track from time to time, but can
track for an hour at a time or more without incident.  When 
it stalls, it lurches forward in steps every four seconds, and
stalls in between.  Lurches amount to about 30 arcsec.  I believe
this is the same problem I've been having, pretty much.

At one point the dome got seriously stuck, chattering and stalling
like it did the other night.  This was when it was attempting to
track, so it manifested as repeated requests from the TCS to move,
with a cycle time of a few seconds.  I turned the auto-dome off,
disabled the yellow dome button, 
and went to manually move it in the other direction, but - it wouldn't move
either way!  I fixed it simply by trying it over several times
and letting it chew away for 5-10 seconds, because I knew that 
if the dome was really stuck, I was I was totally
sunk.  After several tries it caught and started to move. 
Once it was free, I mostly operated with autodome off, and 
aligned the dome by hand.  This is not difficult since the 
TCS readout displays the dome azimuth error. 

One key bit of information:  the bad spot in the dome track
is at azimuth 124 degrees.

[again, this trouble report is one day off.  I'm filing this
on the AM of Sat, Sep 2].

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Submitted on 2006 Sep 2 [4:30:07]