MDM Trouble Report for 2007 Apr 19

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Werk, Putman (U Michigan)
Instrument: MkIII

Problem(s) Encountered:
Problem 1: we redid the course focus of the guider camera. lost approximately 30 
minutes. In the observer report last night we noticed that the coarse focus of the guide camera 
was significantly off, since it was impossible to get a guide star off the slit in
focus. Bob helped up to adjust the coarse focus tonight, so that we could offset guide. 
This adjustment took approximately 30 minutes. 

Problem 2: Pointing was consistently bad tonight due probably to the new TCS
computer installation that happened during the day. At just about every new position we 
had to center on a bright star and redo the encoders just to be able to see our objects. 
Since we're doing blind offsets to acquire our faint targets, we needed pointing to 
be very accurate. Once we got going, the pointing of the telescope started to improve. 

Problem 3: Unfortunately, just as we got going, at about 2am we started getting warnings that coordinates couldn't be
set, that TCS had timed out, etc. We tried restarting xtcs, reinitializing, and that didn't
help at all. Error messages read something like: 
 Could not send coords, TCS timed out  and 
 Warning: could not read TCS/MIS info  in ccdcom. 
and the cryptic,  reset rsys  after the TCS not responding message in xtcs. 
Ultimately, we ended up rebooting the TCS computer, which lost us a bunch of time.
Redoing the pointing was an added annoyance, since it seemed we had to start from
scratch again, with really bad pointing. 
Note: when we did this, not only did we have to reset the dome encoders, but 
the instrument rotator is reading the wrong angle on the TCS monitor.  We tried resetting
the rotator encoder under setup on the xtcs, but nothing happened except we'd get
an error message saying  equinox out of range. This seemed strange to us, since we
were clearly in the rotator encoder window, which we imagine has little to do with the 
equinox. 

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Submitted on 2007 Apr 19 [4:24:14]