MDM Trouble Report for 2007 Jun 13 Telescope: 2.4m Observer(s): McGreer (Columbia) Instrument: Echelle Problem(s) Encountered: Note: a new TCS computer was installed today. When I first opened up, I went about 1.5 hours east to do flats. I noticed that the dome error was -103, and I went out in the dome and it was in fact out of position. I tried moving the telescope a short slew but nothing happened. I moved over to 1.5 hours west and the dome error became 48, and on the way I saw the error message Auto Dome off . But the switch was up and the dome had already moved some distance. I toggled the switch and then the dome moved to the correct position. No further error messages. At 12:05am, I had just slewed to an object about 3 hrs west at a dec of 25 when I entered an object command to ccdcom. I received an error message *** warning: could not read TCS/MIS info . I repeated the command with the same result. Then XTCS showed a message TCS timed out , followed by TCS not responding resync retry . I tried changing the coords in XTCS but they were not sent on to TCS. At this point I noticed that TCS had not fixed on the next object, and was showing a changing hour angle instead of the usual row of asterisks. I tried getting coords for a nearby bright star but when I tried to send them I receive the timed out message again, also error sending coords to TCS . Then the message DEC encoder not responding . I was not guiding at any point here. I tried using the hand paddle and TCS showed RA or DEC encoder not responding . Also, a star was visible in the guider display, and it was not moving when I used the hand paddle. I killed xtcs and restarted/reinitialized. After hitting the initialize button, I received the same sequence of error messages: TCS timed out, TCS not responding. I tried a hard slews in all directions with the hand paddle, but there was no response and the star was clearly not moving. I tried doing a clear link but the same sequence of error messages resulted. I decided to reboot the TCS PC. It came back online and moved the telescope, unfortunately to the SW where it reached the hard limits. I followed the procedure to recover it and brought it to zenith. At this point TCS read an hour angle of 8:52:3, RA of 8:34:5, and DEC 82:47:30, and a next object at 17:11:16.8, 31:57:13 2007.45. I set the position to sidereal time and the correct declination. I went to the nearest bright. When I tried to take an image, I got the same error message from ccdcom could not read TCS . The green start button was off, even though I had turned it on while returning to zenith. I turned it on and a ccdcom status was okay. The bright star was just off the image, about 5arcmin to the west. Interestingly, N/S was about where it was before. I centered the star, reset the encoders (no errors), and went to another bright. The pointing remained stable. I then discovered that the dome was out of position by 10 degrees or so, even though did not report an error. I tried moving the telescope slightly but the dome did not respond. I sent it home, but it was about 50 degrees off. I turned off auto dome, moved it home manually, and reset the encoder. When I re-enabled auto dome, I went out into the dome and saw that it moved about 10 degrees, paused, had three short bursts of motion where it paused for a few seconds in between, and then finally it moved the remaining 20 degrees or so to the correct position for the telescope pointing. Lastly, the focus was then completely off. I had to spend some time recovering it, it had decreased about 200 units from where I had it previously. After that, I saw no further errors and the pointing was stable and correct. I checked on the dome frequently and it was also correct. Lastly, at the beginning of the night, I tried to take R flats, and it appeared the filter had not moved completely into position, in the images it appears there is some vignetting. I moved the filter around once and it was still there but less so, I did it again and it went away. ------------------------------ Submitted on 2007 Jun 13 [5:31:22]