MDM Trouble Report for 2008 Oct 29

Telescope: 1.3m
Observer(s): Denney (OSU)
Instrument: CCDS

Problem(s) Encountered:
The first problem I had I summarized in the observing report:  the
dome stopped tracking a couple of times.  The problem was corrected
with the 'dome center' command.

The 2nd problem, which was rather odd, was a computer problem.  It 
started after I had typed 'go' for a comp lamp exposure, I got the
following error in prospero:
 IC> WARNING: ERROR: No Response ACQTAG=CCDS.20081028191543 
However, I didn't notice it at first because nothing actually went
wrong, the exposure completed without a problem.

When I went to take the next set of exposures, however, a set of mgo 3
for a target, nothing happened - I just got white space in the
prospero window and the exposure didn't start, etc.

I typed tcstatus in the TCS Agent console and that seemed to be
up and running fine.  Even though an exposure hadn't actually
started yet, I tried typing ctrl-x in the prospero window to
try to abort the image, and that just actually printed  ^X  in
the prospero window.

Then, I went to the IC and typed 'seqinit', but after running
through all of the stuff that does, I got an error message:
 Error: timeout waiting for word in from HE   However, in the 
display at the top of the IC screen, the +HE was illuminated.
After this, however, I noticed on the IC screen that an exposure
had just started, so I came back out to the prospero window
on McGraw and saw the following above the count down for the 
exposure:
 Error: message is not an instrument status string
 PONG
 Error: Cannot get instrument (IE) status 

After this, everything was working fine.  I have not idea what
any of this means, but it didn't seem to affect any of the rest
of my observing.




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Submitted on 2008 Oct 29 [6:15:06]