MDM Trouble Report for 2008 Feb 14

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Statler, Riethmiller, Cotto-Figueroa (Ohio Univ.)
Instrument: Direct/Echelle

Problem(s) Encountered:
Autoguider stopped moving the telescope at about 2:50 AM. We first
tried exiting and restarting TVGUIDER, which didn't work. We then
tried rebooting the guider PC, which also didn't work. At this
point we noticed that the TCS display was completely frozen. The
telescope was correctly guiding (we could see a star on the guide
camera monitor, not moving), but the HA readout was not changing.
Realizing the problem was with TCS, we first restarted and re-
initialized xcts. We didn't expect this to accomplish anything
and it didn't. We then exited the TCS program and restarted
HILTNER.EXE. This cleared the freezeup, but left the pointing
about 20 minutes off. We followed the manual procedure for
regaining pointing without much difficulty. Total time lost was
about 1 hour.

Later, while taking twilight flats, we saw that our first 2
exposures were badly trailed north/south. (I.e. perhaps 2 arcmin
in a 45 sec exposure. This continued until we turned the
autoguider toggle on the TCS box back on. Then things were
normal. We can't say for certain whether flipping the toggle
was the cause of or just coincident with the return of proper
functionality.

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Submitted on 2008 Feb 14 [7:20:00]